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't 




THE MODERN LIBRARY 

* 

OF THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


Turn to the end of this volume 
for a complete list of titles 
in the Modern Library 





Copyright, 1917 , by 

JAMES BRANCH CABELL 

Oc 

-3 







Manufactured in the United States of America 
for The Modern Library, Inc., by H . Wolf 




















TO 

LOUISA NELSON 

“At me ab amore tuo diducet 
nulla senectus” 




Introduction 


I N one of the charming essays wherein Anatole 
France narrates the adventures of his soul I find 
these words : 

“It is good to be reasonable and to love only the true ; 
yet there are hours when common reality no longer sat- 
isfies and one yearns to escape from nature. We know 
well that this is impossible, but we do not desire it the 
less for that. Are not our most irrealizable desires the 
most ardent ? Doubtless — and this is our great misery 
— doubtless we cannot escape from ourselves. We are 
condemned, irrevocably, to see all things reflected in us 
with a mournful and desolating monotony. For this 
very reason we thirst after the unknown and aspire to 
what is beyond us. We must have the unusual. We 
are asked, 'What do you wish?* And we reply, 'I 
wish something else.' What we touch, what we see, 
is nothing: we are drawn toward the intangible and 
the invisible.” 

It is a philosophy of disillusion, the graceful sigh 
of an Epicurean who has concurred in the wisdom 
of Heraclitus : an Epicurean, however, in whose wis~ 
ix 


X 


INTRODUCTION 


dom is the fragrance of compassion and understand- 
ing, and who has achieved to the dignity that is in- 
capable alike of enthusiasm and despair. 

James Branch Cabell agrees with M. Anatole 
France. He has observed life very closely — too 
closely, perhaps, ever to surprise its deepest secrets — 
and, in a dozen volumes he has intimated, with 
exquisite urbanity, that it leaves much to be de- 
sired. He has even ventured to supply a few of 
the omissions, troubled always by the suspicion that 
he must inevitably fail, yet consoled by the sublime 
faith that “to write perfectly of beautiful happen- 
ings” will ensure his labors against utter oblivion. 

From the beginning of these labors Mr. Cabell 
has ranked himself with the skeptics. In itself this 
is no distinction, for skepticism nowadays is al- 
most as easy to acquire as faith, — indeed, for most 
of its devotees, it is the expression of a faith — 
a rebours. But Mr. Cabell, being essentially an 
aristocrat of sensibilities, and averse from indul- 
gence in the obvious, has always insisted upon dis- 
tinction. He has found it by introducing into his 
skepticism two qualities: good taste and irony. 
That is to say, every doubt which issues from his 
fertile intelligence must be arrayed in the brilliant 
garb of a courtier, whose flattery of the monarch — 
Life — is a veiled sarcasm, so delicately worded that 


INTRODUCTION 


xi 


only upon reflection does one perceive the sting. 

Yet even the flattery is sincere, and the mockery, 
however mordant, conceals a poignant wistfulness. 
Nowhere in his books can a shrewd reader charge 
him with lese-majeste towards life. It is true that 
superficially Mr. Cabell is an advocate for ennui, 
seeming to relish with soft melodious laughter every 
imperfection discoverable in the features of* “real- 
ity.’ ’ And unquestionably the author of Domnei, 
of Gallantry , of The Cream of the Jest , Jurgen and 
Figures of Earth communicates always a profound 
discontent with things-as-they-are, seeks always a 
country modeled upon dreams wherein is neither 
ambiguity nor frustration, nor any hint of sorrow 
or regret. But this is the prerogative of huckster 
and genius alike. Mr. Cabell has fished in deep 
waters, and so, not content with “desiderating” — 
the word is peculiarly his own — a “life beyond life , ’*■ 
he terminates all his valiant errantry into Cocaigne 
and Storisende and Poictesme with the invariable 
conclusion that one should make the best of this 
world, since all others are conjectural, and all con- 
jectures, however beautiful and necessary, a little 
childish. 

This attitude, mingling an adroit, uncanny and 
disconcerting insight with a suave good humor en- 
titles Mr. Cabell to be called a philosopher. The 


INTRODUCTION 


xii 


pedantic will add “a pessimist.” Oddly enough, the 
word fits like a glove; what pessimism deeper than 
to have perceived, with equal clarity, and in one 
glance, the inadequacy of life and the fatal im- 
potence of the dreams whereby living was to become 
an enfranchisement of all things noble and lovely 
and gracious? And having perceived this, to say, 
smilingly, almost casually: ‘‘Live your life, acquiesce 
in life, as becomes a gentleman ; dream your dreams, 
love your dreams, as becomes a child. In neither 
case will you be assured of happiness, yet it may be 
that in both you will find content. It is enough.” 

Hereafter one is to follow the adventures of Felix 
Kennaston, alias Horvendile, in quest of the elixir 
of “something else.” And in the man’s pathetic 
fumbling at locked doors, in his patient decipher- 
ing of the Sigil of Scoteia, one may divine an 
allegory, composite of this world and all the worlds 
that never were or shall be. The riddle stays in- 
soluble, yet in the words of Jean Dolent the riddle 
finds explicitness : 

“La vie: C’est la femme que Von a; 

L’art: C’est la femme que Von desire ” 

Harold Ward. 


New York, 
jo October, 1922. 


Contents 


BOOK FIRST 

CHAPTER 

I Palliation of the Gambit . . . 

II Introduces the Ageless Woman . 

III Wherein a Clerk Appraises a Fair 

Country * 

IV Of the Double-Dealer’s Traffic 

with a Knave 

V How the Double-Dealer was of 
Two Minds ....... 

VI Treats of Maugis d’Aigremont’s 

Pottage 

VII Journeys End: with the Custom- 
ary Unmasking 

BOOK SECOND 

VIII Of a Trifle Found in Twilight . 
IX Beyond Use and Wont Fares the 

Road to Storisende 

X Of Idle Speculations in a Library 
XI How There was a Light in the Fog 
XII Of Publishing: with an Unlikely 
Appendix 


PACE 

3 

6 

13 

16 

20 

23 

26 

35 

38 

46 

52 

5 7 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

XIII Suggesting Themes of Universal 

Appeal 67 

XIV Peculiar Conduct of a Personage . 74 

XV Of Vain Regret and Wonder in the 

Dark 85 

BOOK THIRD 

XVI They Come to a High Place . . 95 

XVII Of the Sigil and One Use of It . 99 

XVIII Treats of a Prelate and, in Part, 

of Pigeons 101 

XIX Local Laws of Nephelococcygia . 108 

XX Of Divers Fleshly Riddles . . . 114 

XXI In Pursuit of a Whisper . . . 118 

XXII Of Truisms: Treated Reasonably . 123 


BOOK FOURTH 

XXIII Economic Considerations of Piety 129 

XXIV Deals with Pen Scratches . . . 135 

XXV By-Products of Rational Endeavor 140 

XXVI “Epper Si Muove” 146 

XXVII Evolution of a Vestryman . . . 154 

XXVIII The Shallowest Sort of Mysticism 169 

BOOK FIFTH 

XXIX Of Poetic Love: Treated with Po- 
etic Inefficiency 175 

XXX Cross-Purposes in Spacious Times . 188 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER p AGE 

XXXI Horvendile to Ettarre: at White- 
hall 194 

XXXII Horvendile to Ettarre: at Vaux- 

le-Vicomte 198 

XXXIII Horvendile to Ettarre : in the 

CONCIERGERIE 202 

XXXIV Of One Enigma That Threatened 

to Prove Allegorical .... 208 

XXXV Treats of Witches, Mixed Drinks, 

and the Weather 214 

BOOK SIXTH 

XXXVI Sundry Disclosures of the Press . 223 

XXXVII Considerations toward Sunset . . 227 

XXXVIII One Way of Elusion 230 

XXXIX Past Storisende Fares the Road of 

Use and Wont 233 

XL Which Mr. Flaherty Does Not 

Quite Explain 240 










BOOK FIRST 


“Give place, fair ladies, and begone, 
Ere pride hath had a fall! 

For here at hand approacheth one 
Whose grace doth stain you all. 

“Ettarre is well compared 
Unto the Phoenix kind, 

Whose like was never seen or heard, 
That any man can find ” 












- 

























































* 

* 




- 





















































A 






4 





















Palliation of the Gambit 


M UCH has been written critically about Felix 
Kennaston since the disappearance of his 
singular personality from the field of con- 
temporary writers; and Mr. Froser’s Biography 
contains all it is necessary to know as to the facts 
of Kennaston’s life. Yet most readers of the 
Biography , I think, must have felt that the great 
change in Kennaston no long while after he “came 
to forty year” — this sudden, almost unparalleled, 
conversion of a talent for tolerable verse into the full- 
fledged genius of Men Who Loved Alison — stays, 
after all, unexplained. . . . 

Hereinafter you have Kennaston’s own explana- 
tion. I do not know but that in hunting down one 
enigma it raises a bevy; but it, at worst, tells from 
his standpoint honestly how this change came about. 

You are to remember that the tale is pieced to- 
gether, in part from social knowledge of the man, 
and in part from the notes I made as to what Felix 
3 


4 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


iCennaston in person told me, bit by bit, a year or 
two after events the tale commemorates. I had 
known the Kennastons for some while, with that 
continual shallow intimacy into which chance forces 
most country people with their near neighbors, be- 
fore Kennaston ever spoke of — as he called the thing 
— the sigil. And, even then, it was as if with negli- 
gence he spoke, telling of what happened — or had 
appeared to happen — and 1 answering my questions, 
with simply dumbfounding personal unconcern. It 
all seemed indescribably indecent: and I marveled 
no little, I can remember, as I took my notes. . . . 

Now I can understand it was just that his stand- 
ard of values was no longer ours nor really human. 
You see — it hardly matters through how dependable 
an agency — Kennaston no longer thought of himself 
as a man of flesh-and-blood moving about a world 
of his compeers. Or, at least, that especial aspect of 
his existence was to him no longer a phase of any 
particular importance. 

But to tell of his thoughts, is to anticipate. Here- 
inafter you have them full measure and, such as it 
is, his story. You must permit that I begin it in 
my own way, with what may to you at first seem 
dream-stuff. For I commence at Storisende, in the 
world’s youth, when the fourth Count Emmerick 
reigned in Poictesme, having not yet blundered into 


PALLIATION OF THE GAMBIT 


5 


the disfavor of his papal cousin Adrian VII. . . . 
With such roundabout gambits alone can some of 
us approach — as one fancy begets another, if you 
will — to proud assurance that life is not a blind and 
aimless business; not all a hopeless waste and con- 
fusion; and that we ourselves may (by and by) be 
strong and excellent and wise. 

Such, in any event, is the road that Kennaston 
took, and such the goal to which he was conducted. 
So, with that goal in view, I also begin where he 
began, and follow whither the dream led him. 
Meanwhile, I can but entreat you to remember it is 
only by preserving faith in human dreams that we 
may, after all, perhaps some day make them come 
true. 

Richard Fentnor Harrowby. 


Montevideo 
14 April 1917. 


2 . 

Introduces the Ageless Woman 


T HE tale tells how Count Emmerick planned a 
notable marriage-feast for his sister La Beale 
Ettarre and Sir Guiron des Rocques. The 
tale relates that, in honor of this wedding, came 
from Nacumera, far oversea, Count Emmerick’s 
elder sister Dame Melicent and her husband the 
Comte de la Foret, with an outlandish retinue of 
pagan slaves that caused great wonder. All 
Poictesme took holiday. The tale narrates how from 
Naimes to Lisuarte, and in the wild hill-country back 
of Perdigon, knights made ready for the tournament, 
traveling toward Storisende in gay silken garments 
such as were suited to these new times of peace. 
The highways in those parts shone with warriors, 
riding in companies of six or eight, wearing mantles 
worked in gold, and mounted upon valuable horses 
that glittered with new bits and housings. And the 
tale tells, also, how they came with horns sounding 
before them. 


6 


INTRODUCES THE AGELESS WOMAN 


7 


Ettarre watched from the turrets of Storisende, 
pensively. Yet she was happy in these days. “In- 
deed, there is now very little left this side of heaven 
for you to desire, madame,” said Horvendile the 
clerk, who stood beside her at his service. 

“No, there is nothing now which troubles me, 
Horvendile, save the thought of Maugis d’Aigre- 
mont. I cannot ever be sure of happiness so long as 
that man lives.” 

“So, so!” says Horvendile — “ah, yes, a master- 
villain, that! He is foiled for the present, and in 
hiding, nobody knows where; but I, too, would not 
wonder should he be contriving some new knavery. 
Say what you may, madame, I cannot but commend 
his persistency, however base be his motives; and 
in the forest of Bovion, where I rescued you from 
his clutches, the miscreant spoke with a hellish 
gusto that I could have found it in my heart to 
admire.” 

Ettarre had never any liking for this half-scoffing 
kind of talk, to which the clerk was deplorably 
prone. ‘“You speak very strangely at times, Hor- 
vendile. Wickedness cannot ever be admirable ; and 
to praise it, even in jest, cannot but be displeasing 
to the Author of us all.” 

“Eh, madame, I am not so sure of that. Cer- 
tainly, the Author of those folk who have figured 


8 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


thus far in your history has not devoted His talents 
to creating perfect people.” 

' She wondered at him, and showed as much in 
the big blue eyes which had troubled so many men’s 
sleep. “Since time began, there has lived no nobler 
person or more constant lover than my lord Guiron.” 

“Oh, yes, Sir Guiron, I grant you, is very nearly 
immaculate,” said Horvendile; and he yawned. 

“My friend, you have always served him faith- 
fully. We two cannot ever forget how much we 
have owed in the past to your quick wits and shrewd 
devices. Yet now your manner troubles me.” 

Dame Ettarre spoke the truth, for, knowing the 
man to be unhappy — and suspecting the reason of 
his unhappiness, too — she would have comforted 
him.; but Horvendile was not in a confiding mood. 
Whimsically he says : 

“Rather, it is I who am troubled, madame. For 
envy possesses me, and a faint teasing weariness also 
possesses me, because I am not as Sir Guiron, and 
never can be. Look you, they prepare your wedding- 
feast now, your former sorrows are stingless; and 
to me, who have served you through hard seasons of 
adversity, it is as if I had been reading some ro- 
mance, and had come now to the last page. Already 
you two grow shadowy ; and already I incline to rank 
Sir Guiron and you, madame, with Arnaud and Fre- 


INTRODUCES THE AGELESS WOMAN 


9 


gonde, with Palmerin and Polinarda, with Gui and 
Floripas — with that fair throng of noted lovers 
whose innocuous mishaps we follow with pleasant 
agitation, and whom we dismiss to eternal happiness, 
with smiling incredulity, as we turn back to a worka- 
day world. For it is necessary now that I return to 
my own country, and there I shall not ever see you 
any more.” 

# Ettarre, in common with the countryside, knew 
the man hopelessly loved her ; and she pitied him to- 
day beyond wording. Happiness is a famed breeder 
of magnanimity. “My poor friend, we must get 
you a wife. Are there no women in your country ?” 

“Ah, but there is never any woman in one’s own 
country whom one can love, madame,” replies Hor- 
vendile shrewdly. “For love, I take it, must look 
toward something not quite accessible, something 
not quite understood. Now, I have been so un- 
fortunate as to find the women of my country lack- 
ing in reticence. I know their opinions concerning 
everything — touching God and God’s private inten- 
tions, and touching me, and the people across the 
road — and how these women’s clothes are adjusted, 
and what they eat for breakfast, and what men have 
kissed them : there is no room for illusion anywhere. 
Nay, more : I am familiar with the mothers of these 
women, and in them I see quite plainly what these 


10 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


women will be some twenty years from this morn- 
ing; there is not even room for hope. Ah, no, 
madame ; the women of my country are the pleas- 
antest of comrades, and the helpfullest of wives: 
but I cannot conceal it from myself that, after all, 
they are only human beings; and therefore it has 
never been possible for me to love any one of 
them.” 

“And am I not, then, a human being, poor Hor- 
vendile?” 

There was a tinge of mischief in the query; but 
beauty very often makes for lightheadedness, both 
in her that has and in him that views it ; nor between 
Ind and Thule was there any lovelier maid than 
Ettarre. Smiling she awaited his answer; the sun- 
light glorified each delicate clarity of color in her 
fair face, and upon her breast gleamed the broken 
sigil of Scoteia, that famed talisman which never 
left her person. “And am I not, then, a human 
being?” says she. 

Gravely Horvendile answered : “Not in my eyes, 
madame. For you embody all that I was ever able 
to conceive of beauty and fearlessness and strange 
purity. Therefore it is evident I do not see in you 
merely Count Emmerick’s third sister, but, instead, 
that ageless lovable and loving woman long wor- 
shiped and sought everywhere in vain by all poets.” 


INTRODUCES THE AGELESS WOMAN 


11 


“But I had thought poets were famous for their 
inconstancy. It is remarkable hearing that, to the 
contrary, they have all loved steadfastly the same 
woman; and, in any case, I question how, without 
suspecting it, I could have been that woman.” 

Horvendile meditated for a while. “Assuredly, 
it was you of whom blind Homer dreamed, com- 
forting endless night with visions of your beauty, as 
you sat in a bright fragrant vaulted chamber weaw 
ing at a mighty loom, and embroidering on tapestry 
the battles men were waging about Troy because 
of your beauty; and very certainly it was to you that 
Hermes came over fields of violets and parsley, 
where you sang magic rhymes, sheltered by an 
island cavern, in which cedar and citron-wood were 
burning — and, calling you Calypso, bade you release 
Odysseus from the spell of your beauty. Sophocles, 
too, saw you bearing an ewer of bronze, and tread- 
ing gingerly among gashed lamentable corpses, lest 
your loved dead be dishonored ; and Sophocles called 
you Antigone, praising your valor and your beauty. 
And when men named you Bombyca, Theocritus 
also sang of your grave drowsy voice and your feet 
carven of ivory, and of your tender heart and all 
your honey-pale sweet beauty.” 

“I do not remember any of these troubadours you 
speak of, my poor Horvendile; but I am very certain 


\z 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


that if they were poets they, also, must in their time 
have talked a great deal of nonsense.” 

“And as Mark's Queen,” says Horvendile, in- 
tent on his conceit, “you strayed with Tristran in 
the sunlit glades of Morois, that high forest, where 
many birds sang full-throated in the new light of 
spring; as Medeia you fled from Colchis; and as 
Esclairmonde you delivered Huon from the sardonic 
close wiles of heathenry, which to you seemed child- 
ish. All poets have had these fitful glimpses of you, 
‘Ettarre, and of that perfect beauty which is full of 
troubling reticences, and so, is somehow touched 
with something sinister. Now all these things I 
likewise see in you, Ettarre; and therefore, for my 
own sanity's sake, I dare not concede that you are a 
human being.” 

The clerk was very much in earnest. Ettarre 
granted that, insane as his talk seemed to her; and 
the patient yearning in his eyes was not displeasing 
to Ettarre. Her hand touched his cheek, quickly 
and lightly, like the brush of a bird’s wing. 

“My poor Horvendile, you are in love with fan- 
tasies. There was never any lady such as you 
dream of.” Then she left him. 

But Horvendile remained at the parapet, peering 
out over broad rolling uplands. 


3 - 

Wherein a Clerk Appraises a Fair Country 


H ORVENDILE peered out over broad roll- 
ing uplands. . . . He viewed a noble 
country, good to live in, rich with grain and 
metal, embowered with tall forests, and watered 
by pleasant streams. Walled cities it had, and cas- 
tles crowned its eminences. Very far beneath Hor- 
vendile the leaded roofs of these fortresses glittered 
in sunlight, for Storisende guards the loftiest part 
of all Poictesme. 

And the people of this land — from its lords of 
the high, the low, and the middle justice, to the 
sturdy whining beggars at its cathedral doors — 
were not all unworthy of this fair realm. Undoubt- 
edly, it was a land, as Horvendile whimsically re- 
flected, wherein human nature kept its first dignity 
and strength; and wherein human passions were 
never in a poor way to find expression with adequate 
speech and action. 

Now, from the field below, a lark rose singing 
13 


14 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


joyously. Straight into the air it rose, and was lost 
in the sun’s growing brilliance; but you could hear 
its singing; and then, as suddenly, the bird dropped 
to earth. No poet could resist embroidery on such 
a text. 

Began Horvendile straightway: “Quan vey la 
laudeta mover ” — or in other wording: 

“When I behold the skylark move in perfect joy 
toward its love the sun, and, growing drunk with 
joy, forget the use of wings, so that it topples from 
the height of heaven, I envy the bird’s fate. I, too, 
would taste that ruinous mad moment of com- 
munion, there in heaven, and my heart dissolves in 
longing. 

“Ailas ! how little do I know of love ! — I, who was 
once deluded by the conceit that I was all-wise in 
love. For I am unable to put aside desire for a 
woman whom I must always love in vain. She has 
bereft me of hope. She has robbed me of my heart, 
of herself, and of all joy in the world, and she has 
left me nothing save dreams and regrets. 

“Never have I been able to recover my full senses 
since that moment when she first permitted me to see 
myself mirrored in her bright eyes. Hey, fatal mir- 
rors ! which flattered me too much ! for I have sighed 
ever since I beheld my image in you. I have lost my- 
self in you, like Narcissus in his fountain.” 


A CLERK APPRAISES A COUNTRY 


15 


Thus he lamented, standing alone among the tur- 
rets of Storisende. Now a troop of jongleurs was 
approaching the castle — gay dolls, jerked by invisible 
wires, the vagabonds seemed to be, from this height. 

“More merry-makers for the marriage-feast. We 
must spare no appropriate ceremony. And yonder 
Count Emmerick is ordering the major-domo to 
prepare peacocks stuffed with beccaficoes, and a 
pastry budded like a palace. Hah, my beautiful 
fantastic little people, that I love and play with, and 
dispose of just as I please, it is time your master 
shift another puppet.” 

So Horvendile descended, still poetizing: “Pus 
ab mi dons no m pot valer ” — or in other wording: 

“Since nothing will avail to move my lady — not 
prayers or righteous claims or mercy — and she de- 
sires my homage now no longer, I shall have nothing 
more to say of love. I must renounce love, and 
abjure it utterly. I must regard her whom I love 
as one no longer living. I must, in fine, do that 
which I prepare to do; and afterward I must depart 
into eternal exile.” 


4 - 

Of the Double-Dealer’s Traffic with a Knave 


H ORVENDILE left the fortress, and came 
presently to Maugis d’Aigremont. Hor- 
vendile got speech with this brigand where 
he waited encamped in the hill-country of Perdigon, 
loth to leave Storisende since it held Ettarre whom 
he so much desired, but with too few adherents to 
venture an attack. 

Maugis sprawled listless in his chair, wrapped 
in a mantle of soiled and faded green stuff, as though 
he were cold. In his hand was a naked sword, with 
which moodily he was prodding the torn papers 
scattered about him. He did not move at all, but 
his somber eyes lifted. 

“What do you plan now, Horvendile ?” 
“Treachery, messire.” 

“It is the only weapon of you scribblers. How 
will it serve me?” 

Then Horvendile spoke. Maugis sat listening. 
Above the swordhilt the thumb of one hand was 
16 


TRAFFIC WITH A KNAVE 


17 


stroking the knuckles of the other carefully. His 
lean and sallow face stayed changeless. 

Says Maugis: “It is a bold stroke — yes. But 
how do I know it is not some trap for me?” 

Horvendile shrugged, and asked: “Have I not 
served you constantly in the past, messire?” 

“You have suggested makeshifts very certainly. 
And to a pretty pass they have brought me ! Here 
I roost like a starved buzzard, with no recreation 
except upon clear forenoons to look at the towers 
of Storisende.” 

“Meanwhile at Storisende Ettarre prepares to 
marry Sir Guiron.” 

“I think of that. . . . She is very beautiful, is 
she not, Horvendile? And she loves this stately 
kindly fool who carries his fair head so high and has 
no reason to hide anything from her. Yes, she is 
very beautiful, being created perfect by divine malice 
that she might be the ruin of men. So I loved her: 
and she did not love me, because I was not worthy 
of her love. And Guiron is in all things worthy 
of her. I cannot ever pardon him that.” 

“And I am pointing out a way, messire, by which 
you may reasonably hope to deal with Sir Guiron — 
ho, and with the Counts Emmerick and Perion, and 
Heitman Michael, and with Ettarre also — precisely 
as you elect.” 


18 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


Then Maugis spoke wearily. “I must trust you, 
I suppose. But I have no lively faith in my judg- 
ments nowadays. I have played fast and loose with 
too many men, and the stench of their blood is in 
my nostrils, drugging me. I move in a half-sleep, 
and people’s talking seems remote and foolish. I 
can think clearly only when I think of how tender is 
the flesh of Ettarre. Heh, a lovely flashing peril 
allures me, through these days of fog, and I must 
trust you. Death is ugly, I know; but life is ugly 
too, and all my deeds are strange to me.” 

The clerk was oddly moved. “Do you not know 
I love you as I never loved Guiron?” 

“How can I tell? You are an outlander. Your 
ways are not our ways,” says the brigand moodily. 
“And what have I to do with love?” 

“You will talk otherwise when you drink in the 
count’s seat, with Ettarre upon your knee,” Horven- 
dile considered. “Observe, I do not promise you 
success ! Yet I would have you remember it was by 
very much this same device that Count Per ion won 
the sister of Ettarre.” 

“Heh, if we fail,” replies Maugis, “I shall at 
least have done with remembering . . ” Then 
they settled details of the business in hand. 

Thus Horvendile returned to Storisende before 
twilight had thickened into nightfall. He came thus 


TRAFFIC WITH A KNAVE 


19 


to a place different in all things from the haggard 
outlaw’s camp, for Count Emmerick held that night 
a noble revel. There was gay talk and jest and 
dancing, with all other mirth men could devise. 


5 - 

How the Double-Dealer Was of Two Minds 


I T was deep silent night when Horvendile came 
into the room where Ettarre slept. “Out, out !” 
cried Horvendile. “Let us have more light here, 
so that men may see the beauty men die for!” He 
went with a torch from lamp to lamp, kindling them 
all. 

Ettarre stood between the bed-curtains, which 
were green hangings worked with birds and beasts 
of the field, each in his proper colors. The girl was 
robed in white; and upon her breast gleamed the 
broken sigil of Scoteia, that famed talisman which 
never left her person. She wore a scarlet girdle 
about her middle, and her loosened yellow hair fell 
heavy about her. Her fine proud face questioned the 
clerk in silence, without any trace of fear. 

“We must wait now,” says Horvendile, “wait 
patiently for that which is to follow. For while 
the folk of Storisende slept — while your fair, fa- 
20 


THE DOUBLE-DEALER OF TWO MINDS 21 


vored lover slept, Ettarre, and your stout brothers 
Emmerick and Perion slept, and all persons who 
are your servitors and well-wishers slept — I, I, the 
puppet-shifter, have admitted Maugis d’Aigremont 
and his men into this castle. They are at work 
now, hammer-and-tongs, to decide who shall be mas- 
ter of Storisende and you.” 

Her first speech you would have found odd at 
such a time. “But, oh, it was not you who betrayed 
us, Horvendile — not you whom Guiron loved!” 

“You forget,” he returned, “that I, who am with- 
out any hope to win you, must attempt to view the 
squabbling of your other lovers without bias. It is 
the custom of omnipotence to do that, Ettarre. I 
have given Maugis d’Aigremont an equal chance 
with Sir Guiron. It is the custom of omnipotence 
to do that also, Ettarre. You will remember the tale 
was trite even in Job’s far time that the sweetmeats 
of life do not invariably fall to immaculate people.” 

Then, as if on a sudden, Dame Ettarre seemed 
to understand that the clerk’s brain had been turned 
through his hopeless love for her. She wondered, 
dizzily, how she could have stayed blind to his in- 
sanity this long, recollecting the inconsequence of 
his acts and speeches in the past; but matters of 
heavier urgency were at hand. Here, with this ap- 
parent madman, she was on perilous ground; but 


22 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


now had arisen a hideous contention without; and 
the shrieks there, and the clash of metal there, spoke 
with rude eloquence of company even less desir- 
able. 

“Heaven will defend the right!” Ettarre said 
bravely. 

“I am not so sure that Heaven has any finger in 
this pie. An arras hides all. It will lift presently, 
and either Good or Evil, either Guiron or Maugis, 
will come through that arras as your master. I am 
not certain as yet which one I shall permit to enter ; 
and the matter rests with me, Ettarre.” 

“Heaven will defend the right!” Ettarre said 
bravely. 

And at that the arras quivered and heaved, so 
that its heavy embroideries were converted into a 
welter of shimmering gold, bright in the glare of 
many lamps, sparkling like the ocean’s waters at 
sunset; and Horvendile and Ettarre saw nothing 
else there for a breathless moment, which seemed to 
last for a great while. Then, parting, the arras 
yielded up Maugis d’Aigremont. 

Horvendile chuckled. 


6 . 

Treats of Maugis D’Aigremont’s Pottage 


M AUGIS came forward, his eyes fixed hut*- 
grily upon Ettarre. “So a long struggle 
ends,” he said, very quiet. “There is no 
virtue left, Ettarre, save patience.” 

“While life remains I shall not cease to shriek 
out your villainy. O God, men have let Guiron 
die !” she wailed. 

“I will cause you to forget that death is dreadful, 
Ettarre !” 

“I need no teacher now. . . . And so, Guiron is 
dead and I yet live ! I had not thought that would 
be possible.” She whispered this. “Give me your 
sword, Maugis, for just a little while, and then I 
will not hate you any longer.” 

The man said, with dreary patience: “Yes, you 
would die rather than endure my touch. And 
through my desire of you I have been stripped of 
wealth and joy and honor, and even of hope; 
through my desire of you I have held much filthy 
23 


24 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


traffic, with treachery and theft and murder, traffic 
such as my soul loathed: and to no avail! Yes, I 
have been guilty of many wickednesses, as men 
estimate these matters; and yet, I swear to you, I 
seem to myself to be still that boy with whom you 
used to play, when you too were a child, Ettarre, 
and did not hate me. Heh, it is very strange how 
affairs fall out in this world of ours, so that a man 
may discern no aim or purpose anywhere !” 

“Yet it is all foreplanned, Maugis.” Horvendile 
spoke thus. 

“And to what end have you ensnared me, Hor- 
vendile ?” says Maugis, turning wearily. “For the 
attack on Storisende has failed, and I am dying of 
many wounds, Horvendile. See how I bleed ! Gui- 
ron and Michael and Perion and all their men are 
hunting me everywhere beyond that arras, and I am 
frightened, Horvendile — even I, who was Maugis, 
am frightened ! — lest any of them find me too soon. 
I desire now only to die untroubled. Oh, Hor- 
vendile, in an ill hour I trusted you!” 

As knave and madman, Ettarre saw the double- 
dealer and his dupe confront each other. In the 
haggard face of Maugis, no longer evil, showed only 
puzzled lassitude. In the hand of Horvendile a 
dagger glittered; and his face was pensive, as he 
said : 


MAUGIS D’AIGREMONT’S POTTAGE 


25 


“My poor Maugis, it is not yet time I make my 
dealings plain to you. It suffices that you have 
served my turn, Maugis, and that of you I have 
no need any longer. You must die now, Maugis.” 

Ettarre feared this frozen madman, she who was 
by ordinary fearless. Ettarre turned away her face, 
so that she might not see the two men grapple. 
Without, the uproar continued — for a long while, it 
seemed. When she looked again it was, by some 
great wonder-working, to meet Guiron’s eyes and 
Guiron’s lips. 


7 - 

Journeys End : With the Customary 
Unmasking 



Y love, Ettarre, they have not harmed 
you?” 

“None has harmed me, Guiron. Oh, 


and you?” 

“Maugis is dead,” he answered joyously. “See, 
here he lies, slain by brave Horvendile. And the 
rogues who followed Maugis are all killed or fled. 
Our woes are at an end, dear love.” 

Then Ettarre saw that Horvendile indeed waited 
beside the dead body of Maugis d’Aigremont. And 
the clerk stayed motionless while she told Guiron 
of Horvendile’s baleful work. 

Sir Guiron then said : “Is this true speech, Hor- 
vendile?” 

“It is quite true I have done all these things, 
messire,” Horvendile answered quietly. 

“And with what purpose?” said Sir Guiron, 
very sadly; for to him too it seemed certain that 
26 


JOURNEYS END 


27 


such senseless treachery could not spring from any- 
thing but madness, and he had loved Horvendile. 

“1 will tell you,” Horvendile replied, “though 
I much fear you will not understand — ” He medi- 
tated, shook his head, smiling. “Indeed, how is it 
possible for me to make you understand? Well, I 
blurt out the truth. There was once in a land very 
far away from this land — in my country — a writer 
of romances. And once he constructed a romance 
which, after a hackneyed custom of my country, 
he pretended to translate from an old manuscript 
written by an ancient clerk — called Horvendile. It 
told of Horvendile’s part in the love-business be- 
tween Sir Guiron des Rocques and La Beale Ettarre. 
I am that writer of romance. This room, this castle, 
all the broad rolling countryside without, is but a 
portion of my dream, and these places have no ex- 
istence save in my fancies. And you, messire — and 
you also, madame — and dead Maugis here, and all 
the others who seemed so real to me, are but the 
puppets I fashioned and shifted, for a tale’s sake, in 
that romance which now draws to a close.” 

He paused; and Sir Guiron sighed. “My poor 
Horvendile!” was all he said. 

“It is not possible for you to believe me, of course. 
And it may be that I, too, am only a figment of some 
greater dream, in just such case as yours, and that I, 


28 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


too, cannot understand. It may be the very cream of 
the jest that my country is no more real than Storis- 
ende. How could I judge if I, too, were a puppet? 
It is a thought which often troubles me. . . .” 

Horvendile deliberated, then spoke more briskly. 
“At all events, I must return now to my own coun- 
try, which I do not love as I love this bright fan- 
tastic Poictesme that I created — or seemed to create 
— and wherein I was — or seemed to be — omnip- 
otent.” 

Horvendile drew a deep breath; and he looked 
downward at the corpse he had bereft of pride and 
daring and agility. “Farewell, Maugis! It would 
be indecorous, above all in omnipotence, to express 
anything save abhorrence toward you: yet I de- 
lighted in you as you lived^and moved; and it was 
not because of displeasure with you that I brought 
you to disaster. Hence, also, one might evolve a 
heady analogue. . . 

Guiron was wondering what he might do in accord 
with honor and with clemency. He did not stir as 
Horvendile came nearer. The clerk showed very 
pitiful and mean beside this stately champion in full 
armor, all shining metal, save for a surcoat of rose- 
colored stuff irregularly worked with crescents of 
silver. 

“Farewell, Sir Guiron !” Horvendile then said. 


JOURNEYS END 


29 


“There are no men like you in my country. I have 
found you difficult to manage; and I may confess 
now that I kept you so long imprisoned at Caer 
Idryn, and caused you to spend so many chapters 
oversea in heathendom, mainly in order that I might 
here weave out my romance untroubled by your dis- 
concerting and rather wooden perfection. But you 
are not the person to suspect ill of your creator. 
You are all that I once meant to be, Guiron, all that I 
have forgotten how to be ; and for a dead boy’s sake 
I love you.” 

“Listen, poor wretch!” Sir Guiron answered, 
sternly ; “you have this night done horrible mischief, 
you have caused the death of many estimable per- 
sons. Yet I have loved you, Horvendile, and I 
know that Heaven, through Heaven’s inscrutable 
wisdom, has smitten you with madness. That stair 
leads to the postern on the east side of the castle. 
Go forth from Storisende as quickly as you may, 
whilst none save us knows of your double-dealings. 
It may be that I am doing great wrong; but I can- 
not forget I have twice owed my life to you. If I 
must err at all hazards, I prefer to err upon the side 
of gratitude and mercy.” 

“That is said very like you,” Horvendile replied. 
“Eh, it was not for nothing I endowed you with 
sky-towering magnanimity. Assuredly, I go, mes- 


30 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


sire. And so, farewell, Ettarre!” Long and long 
Horvendile gazed upon the maiden. “There is no 
woman like you in my country, Ettarre. I can find 
no woman anywhere resembling you whom dreams 
alone may win to. It is a little thing to say that I 
have loved you; it is a bitter thing to know that I 
must live among, and pursue, and win, those other 
women.” 

“My poor Horvendile,” she answered, very lovely 
in her compassion, “you are in love with fantasies.” 

He held her hand, touching her for the last time; 
and he trembled. “Yes, I am in love with my fan- 
tasies, Ettarre ; and, none the less, I must return into 
my own country.” 

As he considered the future, in the man’s face 
showed only puzzled lassitude; and you saw therein 
a quaint resemblance to Maugis d’Aigremont. “I 
find my country an inadequate place in which to 
live,” says Horvendile. “Oh, many persons live 
there happily enough ! or, at worst, they seem to find 
the prizes and the applause of my country worth 
striving for whole-heartedly. But there is that in 
some of us which gets no exercise there; and we 
struggle blindly, with impotent yearning, to gain 
outlet for great powers which we know that we 
possess, even though we do not know their names. 
And so, we dreamers wander at adventure to Storis- 


JOURNEYS END 


31 


ende — oh, and into more perilous realms sometimes ! 
— in search of a life that will find employment for 
every faculty we have. For life in my country does 
not engross us utterly. We dreamers waste there at 
loose ends, waste futilely. All which we can ever see 
and hear and touch there, we dreamers dimly know, 
is at best but a portion of the truth, and is possibly 
not true at all. Oh, yes ! it may be that we are not 
sane; could we be sure of that, it would be a com- 
fort. But, as it is, we dreamers only know that life 
in my country does not content us, and never can 
content us. So we struggle, for a tiny dear-bought 
while, into other and fairer-seeming lands in search 
of — we know not what ! And, after a little” — he re- 
linquished the maiden’s hands, spread out his own 
hands, shrugging — “after a little, we must go back 
into my country and live there as best we may.” 

A whimsical wise smile now visited Ettarre’s lips. 
Her hands went to her breast, and presently one half 
the broken sigil of Scoteia lay in Horvendile’s hand. 
“You will not always abide in your own country, 
Horvendile. Some day you will return to us at 
Storisende. The sign of the Dark Goddess will 
prove your safe-conduct then if Guiron and I be 
yet alive.” 

Horvendile raised to his mouth the talisman 
warmed by contact with her sweet flesh. “It may be 


32 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


you will not live for a great while,” he says; “but 
that will befall through no lack of loving pains on 
your creator’s part.” 

Then Horvendile left them. In the dark passage- 
way he paused, looking back at Guiron and Ettarre 
for a heart-beat. Guiron and Ettarre had already 
forgotten his existence. Hand in hand they stood 
in the bright room, young, beautiful and glad. Si- 
lently their lips met. 

Horvendile closed the door, and so left Storisende 
forever. Without he came into a lonely quiet-col- 
ored world already expectant of dawn’s occupancy. 
Already the tree-trunks eastward showed like the 
black bars of a grate. Thus he walked in twilight, 
carrying half the sigil of Scoteia. . . • 


BOOK SECOND 


'What e'er she be — 

That inaccessible She 

That doth command my heart and me: 

“ Till that divine 
Idea take a shrine 

Of crystal flesh, through which to shine: 

“ Let her full glory, 

My fancies, fly before ye; 

Be ye my fictions — but her story ” 



Of a Trifle Found in Twilight 


T HUS he walked in twilight, regretful that he 
must return to his own country, and live an- 
other life, and bear another name than that 
•of Horvendile. ... It was droll that in his own 
country folk should call him Felix, since Felix meant 
“happy”, * and assuredly he was not pre-eminently 
happy there. 

At least he had ended the love-business of Ettarre 
and Guiron happily, however droll the necessitated 
makeshifts might have been. . . . He had very cer- 
tainly introduced the god in the car, against Hora- 
tian admonition, had wound up affairs with a sort of 
transformation scene. ... It was, perhaps, at once 
too hackneyed and too odd an ending to be aestheti- 
cally satisfactory, after all. . . . Why, beyond doubt 
it was. He shrugged his impatience. 

“Yet — what a true ending it would be!” he re- 
flected. He was still walking in twilight — for the 
lime was approaching sunset — in the gardens of 
35 


36 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


Alcluid. He must devise another ending for this 
high-hearted story of Guiron and Ettarre. 

Felix Kennaston smiled a little over the thought 
of ending the romance with such topsy-turvy anti- 
climaxes as his woolgathering wits had blundered 
into ; and, stooping, picked up a shining bit of metal 
that lay beside the pathway. He was conscious of 
a vague notion he had just dropped this bit of metal. 

“It is droll how we great geniuses instinctively 
plagiarize/’ he reflected. “I must have seen this a 
half-hour ago, when I was walking up and down 
planning my final chapters. And so, I wove it into 
the tale as a breast-ornament for Ettarre, without 
ever consciously seeing the thing at all. Then, 
presto! I awake and find it growing dark, with me 
lackadaisically astray in the twilight with this picked 
up piece of trash, just as I imagined Horvendile 
walking out of the castle of Storisende carrying' 
much such a jigumicrank. Oh, yes, the processes 
of inspiration are as irrational as if all poets took 
after their mothers.” 

This bit of metal, Kennaston afterward ascer- 
tained, was almost an exact half of a disk, not quite 
three inches in diameter, which somehow had been 
broken or cut in two. It was of burnished metal 
— lead, he thought — about a sixteenth of an inch in 
thickness ; and its single notable feature was the tinjr 


A TRIFLE FOUND IN TWILIGHT 


37 


characters with which one surface was inscribed. 

Later Felix Kennaston was destined to puzzle over 
his inability to recollect what motive prompted him 
to slip this glittering trifle into his pocket. A trifle 
was all that it seemed then. He always remembered 
quite clearly how it sparkled in the abating glare of 
that day’s portentous sunset; and how the tree* 
trunks westward showed like the black bars of a 
grate, as he walked slowly through the gardens of 
Alcluid. Alcluid, be it explained, was the queer 
name with which Felix Kennaston’s progenitors had 
seen fit to christen their fine country home near 
Lichfield. 


Beyond Use and Wont Fares the 
Road to Storisende 


K ENN ASTON was to recall, also, that on this 
evening he dined alone with his wife, sharing 
a taciturn meal. He and Kathleen talked of 
very little, now, save the existent day’s small hap- 
penings, such as having seen So-and-so, and of So- 
and-so’s having said this-or-that, as Kennaston re- 
flected in the solitude of the library. But soon he 
was contentedly laboring upon the book he had al- 
ways intended to write some day. 

Off and on, in common with most high-school 
graduates, Felix Kennaston had been an “intending 
contributor” to various magazines, spasmodically 
bartering his postage-stamps for courteously-worded 
rejection-slips. Then, too, in the old days before his 
marriage, when Kennaston had come so near to cap- 
turing Margaret Hugonin and her big fortune, the 
heiress had paid for the printing of The King's 
Quest and its companion enterprises in rhyme, as 
38 


THE ROAD TO STORISENDE 


39 


well as the prose Defence of Ignorance — wide-mar- 
gined specimens of the far-fetched decadence then 
in vogue, and the idol of Kennaston’s youth, when 
he had seriously essayed the parlor-tricks of 
“stylists.” 

And it was once a familiar story how Marian 
Win wood got revenge on Felix Kennaston, when 
he married Kathleen Saumarez, by publishing, in 
a transparent guise of fiction, all the love-letters he 
had written Miss Winwood; so that Kennaston 
might also have claimed to be generally recognized 
as the actual author of her Epistles of Ananias, 
which had, years earlier, created some literary stir. 

But this book was to be different from any of 
his previous compositions. To paraphrase Felix 
Kennaston’s own words (as recorded in the “Col- 
ophon” to Men Who Loved Alison ) , he had de- 
termined in this story lovingly to deal with an epoch 
and a society, and even a geography, whose comeli- 
ness had escaped the wear-and-tear of ever actually 
existing. He had attempted a jaunt into that 
“happy, harmless Fable-land” which is bounded by 
Avalon and Phseacia and Sea-coast Bohemia, and 
the contiguous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and 
on the west of course by the Hesperides, because he 
believed this country to be the one possible setting 


40 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


for a really satisfactory novel. Kennaston was 
completing, in fine, The Audit at Storisende— or, 
rather, Men Who Loved Alison, as the book came 
afterward to be called. 

Competent critics in plenty have shrugged over 
Kennaston’s cliche of pretending that the romance is 
“re-told” from an ancient manuscript. But to Ken- 
naston the clerk Horvendile, the fictitious first writer 
of the chronicle and eye-witness of its events, was 
necessary. No doubt it handicapped the story's 
progress, so to contrive matters that one subsidiary 
character should invariably be at hand when im- 
portant doings were in execution, and should be 
taken more or less into everyone’s confidence — but 
then, somehow, it made the tale seem real. 

For in the writing it all seemed perfectly real to 
Felix Kennaston. His life was rather barren of 
motive now. In remoter times, when he had wan- 
dered impecuniously from one adventure to another, 
sponging without hesitancy upon such wealthy peo- 
ple as his chatter amused, there had always been ex- 
quisite girls to make love to — such girls as the 
younger generation did not produce — and the ever- 
present problem of whence was to come the fares 
for to-morrow’s hansoms, in which the younger 
generation did not ride. For now hansom cabs were 
wellnigh as uncommon as bicycles or sedan-chairs, 


THE ROAD TO STORISENDE 


41 


he owned two motors, and, by the drollest turn, had 
money in four banks. As recreation went, he and 
Kathleen had in Lichfield their round of decorous 
social duties; and there was nothing else to potter 
with save the writing. And a little by a little the life 
he wrote of came to seem to Felix Kennaston more 
real, and far more vital, than the life his body was 
shuffling through aimlessly. 

For as Horvendile he lived among such gallant 
circumstances as he had always vaguely hoped his 
real life might provide by and by. This Horven- 
dile, coming unintelligibly to Storisende, and wit- 
nessing there the long combat between Sir Guiron 
des Rocques and Maugis d’Aigremont for possession 
of La Beale Alison — as Kennaston’s heroine is called 
of course in the printed book, — this Horvendile now 
seems to us no very striking figure; as in Rob Roy 
and Esmond , it is not to the narrator, but to the 
people and events he tells of, that attention is riv- 
eted. But Felix Kennaston, writing the book, lived 
the life of Horvendile in the long happy hours of 
writing, in stints which steadily became longer and 
more pleasurable ; and insensibly his existence 
blended and was absorbed into the more colorful life 
of Horvendile. It was as Horvendile he wrote, 
seeming actually at times to remember what he re- 
corded, rather than to invent. . . . 


42 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


And he called it inspiration. . . . 

So the tale flowed on, telling how Count Em- 
merick planned a notable marriage-feast for his sis- 
ter La Beale Ettarre and Sir Guiron des Rocques, 
with vastly different results from those already re- 
corded — with the results, in fine, which figure in the 
printed Men Who Loved Alison , wherein Horven- 
dile keeps his proper place as a more-or-less con- 
venient device for getting the tale told. 

But to Kennaston that first irrational winding- 
up of affairs, wherein a world’s creator was able to 
wring only contempt and pity from his puppets — 
since he had not endowed them with any faculties 
wherewith to comprehend their creator’s nature and 
intent — was always the tale’s real ending. . . . 

So it was that the lonely man lived with his 
dreams, and toiled for the vision’s sake contentedly : 
and we of Lichfield who were most familiar with 
Felix Kennaston in the flesh knew nothing then of 
his mental diversions; and, with knowledge, would 
probably have liked him not a bit the better. For 
ordinary human beings, with other normal forms 
of life, turn naturally toward the sun, and are at 
their best thereunder; but it is the misfortune of 
dreamers that their peculiar talents find no exercise 
in daylight. So we regarded Kennaston with the 


THE ROAD TO STORISENDE 


43 


distrust universally accorded people who need to be 
meddling with ideas in a world which sustains its 
mental credit comfortably enough with a current 
coinage of phrases. 

And therefore it may well be that I am setting 
down his story not all in sympathy, for in perfect 
candor I never, quite, liked Felix Kennaston. His 
high-pitched voice in talking, to begin with, was 
irritating : you knew it was not his natural voice, and 
found it so entirely senseless for him to speak thus. 
Then, too, the nervous and trivial grin with which 
he prefaced almost all his infrequent remarks — and 
the odd little noise, that was nearly a snigger and 
just missed being a cough, with which he ended 
them — was peculiarly uningratiating in a fat and 
middle-aged person; his weak eyes very rarely met 
yours full-gaze; and he was continually handling 
his face or fidgeting with a cigarette or twisting in 
his chair. When listening to you he usually nibbled 
at his finger-nails, and when he talked he had a 
secretive way of looking at them. 

Such habits are not wholly incompatible with 
wisdom or generosity, and the devil’s advocate 
would not advance them against their possessor’s 
canonization; none the less, in everyday life they 
make against your enjoying a chat with their pos- 
sessor: and as for Kennaston’s undeniable mental 


44 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


gifts, there is no escaping, at times, the gloomy 
suspicion that fiddling with pens and ink is, after all, 
no fit employment for a grown man. 

Felix Kennaston, to fix the word, was inadequate. 
His books apart, he was as a human being a failure. 
Indeed, in some inexpressible fashion, he impressed 
you as uneasily shirking life. Certainly he seemed 
since his marriage to have relinquished all con- 
versational obligements to his wife. She had a 
curious trick of explaining him, before his face — 
in a manner which was not unreminiscent of the 
lecturer in “side-shows” pointing out the peculiarities 
of the living skeleton or the glass-eater; but it was 
done with such ill-concealed pride in him that I 
found it touching, even when she was boring me 
about the varieties of food he could not be induced 
to touch or his finicky passion for saving every bit 
of string he came across. 

That suggests a minor mystery : many women had 
been fond of Felix Kennaston; and I have yet to 
find a man who liked him even moderately, to offset 
the host who marveled, with unseemly epithets, as 
to what these women saw in him. My wife explains 
it, rather enigmatically, that he was “just a twoser”; 
and that, in addition, he expected women to look 
after him, so that naturally they did. To her su- 
perior knowledge of the feminine mind I can but 


THE ROAD TO STORISENDE 


45 


bow : with the addition (quoting the same authority) 
that a “twoser” is a trousered individual addicted to 
dumbness in company and the very thrilliest sort 
of play-acting in tete-a-tetes. 

At all events, I never quite liked Felix Kennaston 
— not even after I came to understand that the man 
I knew in the flesh was but a very ill-drawn likeness 
of Felix Kennaston. After all, that is the whole 
sardonic point of his story — and, indeed, of every 
human story — that the person you or I find in the 
mirror is condemned eternally to misrepresent us 
in the eyes of our fellows. But even with compre- 
hension, I never cordially liked the man; and so it 
may well be that his story is set down not all in 
sympathy. 

With which Gargantuan parenthesis, in equitable 
warning, I return again to his story. 


10 . 

Of Idle Speculations in a Library 


F ELIX KENNASTON did not write very long 
that night. He fell idly to the droll familiar 
wondering how this dull fellow seated here in 
this luxurious room could actually be Felix Kennas- 
ton. . . . 

He was glad this spacious and subduedly-glowing 
place, and all the comfortable appointments of Al- 
cluid, belonged to him. He had seen enough of the 
scrambling hand-to-mouth makeshifts of poverty, in 
poverty’s heart-depressing habitations, during the 
thirty-eight years he weathered before the simul- 
taneous deaths, through a motor accident, of a semi- 
mythical personage known since childhood as “your 
Uncle Henry in Lichfield,” and of Uncle Henry’s 
only son as well, had raised Felix Kennaston beyond 
monetary frets. As yet Kennaston did not very 
profoundly believe in this unlooked-for turn; and 
in the library of his fine house in particular he had 
46 


OF IDLE SPECULATIONS IN A LIBRARY 47 


still a sense of treading alien territory under suf- 
ferance. 

Yet it was a territory which tempted explora- 
tion with alluring vistas. Kennaston had always 
been, when there was time for it, “very fond of 
reading/’ as his wife was used to state in tones of 
blended patronage and apology. Kathleen Kennas- 
ton, in the old days of poverty, had declaimed too 
many pilfered dicta concerning literary matters to 
retain any liking for them. 

As possibly you may recall, for some years after 
the death of her first husband, Kathleen Eppes 
Saumarez had earned precarious bread and butter 
as a lecturer before women’s clubs, and was more 
or less engaged in journalism, chiefly as a reviewer 
of current literature. For all books she had thus 
acquired an abiding dislike. In particular, I think, 
she loathed the two volumes of “woodland tales” 
collected in those necessitous years, from her 
Woman’s Page in the Lichfield Courier-Herald , for 
the fickle general reading-public, which then used 
to follow the life-histories of Bazoo the Bear and 
Mooshwa the Mink, and other “citizens of the wild,” 
with that incalculable unanimity which to-day may 
be reserved for the biographies of optimistic 
orphans, and to-morrow veers to vies intimes of 
high-minded courtesans with hearts of gold. . . . 


48 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


In fine, through a variety of reasons, Mrs. Kennas- 
ion quite frankly cared even less for books, as mani- 
festations of art, than does the average tolerably 
honest woman to whom books do not represent a 
source of income. 

And you may or may not remember, likewise, 
what Kennaston wrote, about this time, in the 
“Colophon” to Men Who Loved Alison. With in- 
creased knowledge of the author, some sentences 
therein, to me at least, took on larger significance: 

“No one, I take it, can afford to do without books 
unless he be quite sure that his own day and personality 
are the best imaginable; and for this class of persons 
the most crying need is not, of course, seclusion in a 
library, but in a sanatorium. 

“It was, instead, for the great generality, who com- 
bine a taste for travel with a dislike for leaving home, 
that books were by the luckiest hit invented, to con- 
found the restrictions of geography and the almanac. 
In consequence, from the Ptolemies to the Capets, 
from the twilight of a spring dawn in Sicily to the 
uglier shadow of Montfaucon’s gibbet, there intervenes 
but the turning of a page, a choice between Theocritus 
and Villon. From the Athens of Herodotus to the 
Versailles of St.-Simon, from Naishapur to Cranford, 
it is equally quick traveling. All times and lands that 
ever took the sun, indeed, lie open, equally, to the ex- 
plorer by the grace of Gutenberg; and transportation 
into Greece or Rome or Persia or Chicago, equally, is 


OF IDLE SPECULATIONS IN A LIBRARY 49 


the affair of a moment. Then, too, the islands of 
Avalon and Ogygia and Theleme stay always acces- 
sible, and magic casements open readily upon the surf 
of Sea-coast Bohemia. For the armchair traveler 
alone enjoys enfranchisement of a chronology, and of 
a geography, that has escaped the wear-and-tear of 
ever actually existing. 

/‘Peregrination in the realms of gold possesses also 
the quite inestimable advantage that therein one’s per- 
sonality is contraband. As when Dante makes us free 
of Hell and Heaven, it is on the fixed condition of our 
actual love and hate of divers Renaissance Italians, 
whose exploits in the flesh require to-day the curt eluci- 
dation of a footnote, just so, admission to those high 
delights whereunto Shelley conducts is purchased by 
accrediting to clouds and skylarks — let us sanely ad- 
mit — a temporary importance which we would never 
accord them unbiased. The traveler has for the half- 
hour exchanged his personality for that of his guide: 
such is the rule in literary highways, a very necessary 
traffic ordinance : and so long as many of us are, upon 
the whole, inferior to Dante or Shelley — or Sophocles, 
or Thackeray, or even Shakespeare — the change need 
not make entirely for loss. . . 

Yes, it is lightly phrased; but, after all, it is only 
another way of confessing that his books afforded 
Kennaston an avenue to forgetfulness of that fat 
pasty fellow whom Kennaston was heartily tired of 
being. For one, I find the admission significant of 
much, in view of what befell him afterward. 


50 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


And besides — so Kennaston’s thoughts strayed at 
times — these massed books, which his predecessor 
at Alcluid had acquired piecemeal through the term 
of a long life, were a part of that predecessor’s per- 
sonality. No other man would have gathered and 
have preserved precisely the same books, and each 
book, with varying forcefulness, had entered into his 
predecessor’s mind and had tinged it. These parti- 
colored books, could one but reconstruct the mosaic 
correctly, would give a candid portrait of “your 
Uncle Henry in Lichfield,” which would perhaps 
surprise all those who knew him daily in the flesh. 
Of the fact that these were unusual books their pres- 
ent owner and tentative explorer had no doubt what- 
ever. They were perturbing books. 

Now these books by their pleasant display of 
gold-leaf, soberly aglow in lamplight, recalled an 
obscure association of other tiny brilliancies; and 
Felix Kennaston recollected the bit of metal he 
had found that evening. 

Laid by the lamp, it shone agreeably as Kennas- 
ton puckered his protruding brows over the charac- 
ters with which it was inscribed. So far as touched 
his chances of deciphering them, he knew all foreign 
languages were to him of almost equal inscrutability. 
French he could puzzle out, or even Latin, if you 


OF IDLE SPECULATIONS IN A LIBRARY 51 


gave him plenty of time and a dictionary; but this 
inscription was not in Roman lettering. He wished, 
with time-dulled yearning, that he had been accorded 
a college education. . . . 


II. 


How There W as a Light in the Fog 


A S she came toward him through the fog, 
“How annoying it is,” she was saying plain- 
tively, “that these moors are never properly 
lighted.” 

“Ah, but you must not blame Ole-Luk-Oie,” he 
protested. “It is all the fault of Beatrice 
Cenci. . . .” 

Then Kennaston knew he had unwittingly spoken 
magic words, for at once, just as he had seen it done 
in theaters, the girl’s face was shown him clearly in 
a patch of roseate light. It was the face of Ettarre. 

“Things happen so in dreams,” he observed. “I 
know perfectly well I am dreaming, as I have very 
often known before this that I was dreaming. But 
it was always against some law to tell the people in 
my nightmares I quite understood they were not 
real people. To-day in my daydream, and here again 
to-night, there is no such restriction; and lovely as 
52 


HOW THERE WAS A LIGHT IN THE FOG 53 


you are, I know that you are just a daughter of sub- 
consciousness or of memory or of jumpy nerves or, 
perhaps, of an improperly digested entree.” 

“No, I am real, Horvendile — but it is I who am 
dreaming you.” 

“I had not thought to be a part of any woman’s 
dream nowadays. . . . Why do you call me Hor- 
vendile ?” 

She who bore the face of Ettarre pondered mo- 
mentarily ; and his heart moved with glad adoration. 

“Now, by the beard of the prophet! I do not 
know,” the girl said, at last. 

“The name means nothing to you?” 

“I never heard it before. But it seemed natural, 
somehow — just as it did when you spoke of Ole- 
Luk-Oie and Beatrice Cenci.” 

“But Ole-Luk-Oie is the lord and master of all 
dreams, of course. And that furtive long-dead 
Roman girl has often troubled my dream's. When 
I was a boy, you conceive, there was in my room 
at the first boarding-house in which I can remember 
dieting, a copy of the Guido portrait of Beatrice 
Cenci — a copy done in oils, a worthless daub, I 
suppose. But there was evil in the picture — a lurk- 
ing devilishness, which waited patiently and alertly 
until I should do what that silent watcher knew I 
was predestined to do, and, being malevolent, wanted 


54 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


me to do. I knew nothing then of Beatrice Cenci, 
mark you, but when I came to learn her history I 
thought the world was all wrong about her. That 
woman was evil, whatever verse-makers may have 
fabled, I thought for a long while. . . . To-day I 
believe the evil emanated from the person who 
painted that particular copy. I do not know 
who that person was, I never shall know. But 
the black magic of that person’s work was very 
potent.” 

And Kennaston looked about him now, to find 
fog everywhere — impenetrable vapors which vaguely 
showed pearl-colored radiancies here and there, but 
no determinable forms of trees or of houses, or of 
anything save the face of Ettarre, so clearly dis- 
cerned and so lovely in that strange separate cloud 
of roseate light. 

“Ah, yes, those little magics” — it was the girl 
who spoke — “those futile troubling necromancies 
that are wrought by portraits and unfamiliar rooms 
and mirrors and all time-worn glittering objects — 
by running waters and the wind’s persistency, and 
by lonely summer noons in forests. . . . These are 
the little magics, that have no large power, but how 
inconsequently do they fret upon men’s heart- 
strings !” 

“As if some very feeble force — say, a maimed 


HOW THERE WAS A LIGHT IN THE FOG 55 


elf — were trying to attract your attention? Yes, I 
think I understand. It is droll.” 

“And how droll, too, it is how quickly we com- 
municate our thoughts — even though, if you notice, 
you are not really speaking, because your lips are 
not moving at all.” 

“No, they never do in dreams. One never seem$, 
in fact, to use one’s mouth — you never actually eat 
anything, you may also notice, in dreams, even 
though food is very often at hand. I suppose it is 
because all dream food is akin to the pomegranates 
of Persephone, so that if you taste it you cannot 
ever return again to the workaday world. . . . But 
why, I wonder, are we having the same dream? — 
it rather savors of Morphean parsimony, don’t you 
think, thus to make one nightmare serve for two 
people? Or perhaps it is the bit of metal I found 
this afternoon — ” 

And the girl nodded. “Yes, it is on account of 
the sigil of Scoteia. I have the other half, you 
know.” 

“What does this mean, Ettarre — ?” he began; 
and reaching forward, was about to touch her, when 
the imi verse seemed to fold about him, just as 
a hand closes. . . . 

And Felix Kennaston was sitting at the writing- 


56 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


table in the library, with a gleaming scrap of metal 
before him; and, as the clock showed, it was bed- 
time. 

“Well, it is undoubtedly quaint how dreams draw 
sustenance from half-forgotten happenings,” he re- 
flected ; “to think of my recollecting that weird daub 
which used to deface my room in Fairhaven! I had 
forgotten Beatrice entirely. And I certainly never 
spoke of her to any human being, except of course to 
Muriel Allardyce. . . . But I would not be at all 
surprised if I had involuntarily hypnotized myself, 
sitting here staring at this shiny piece of lead — you 
read of such cases. I believe I will put it away, to 
play with again sometime.” 


Of Publishing : With an Unlikely 
Appendix 


S O Kennaston preserved this bit of metal. “No 
fool like an old fool,” his common-sense testily- 
assured him. But Felix Kennaston’s life was 
rather barren of interests nowadays. . . . 

He thought no more of his queer dream, for a long 
while. Life had gone on decorously. He had com- 
pleted The Audit at Storisende, with leisured joy 
in the task, striving to write perfectly of beautiful 
happenings such as life did not afford. There is no 
denying that the typed manuscript seemed to Felix 
Kennaston— as he added the last touches, before 
expressing it to Dapley & Pildriff — to inaugurate a 
new era in literature. 

Kennaston was yet to learn that publishers in their 
business capacity have no especial concern with lit- 
erature. To his bewilderment he discovered that 
publishers seemed sure the merits of a book had 
nothing to do with the advisability of printing it. 
57 


58 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


Herewith is appended a specimen or two from Felix 
Kennaston’s correspondence. 

Dapley & Pildriff — “We have carefully read your 
story, ‘The Audit at Storisende,’ which you kindly sub- 
mitted to us. It is needless for us to speak of the lit- 
erary quality of the story : it is in fact exquisitely done, 
and would delight a very limited circle of readers 
trained to appreciate such delicate productions. But 
that class of readers is necessarily small, and the gen- 
eral reader would, we fear, fail to recognize the book’s 
merit and be attracted to it. For this reason we do 
not feel — and we regret to confess it — that the publi- 
cation of this book would be a wise business enterprise 
for us to undertake. We wish that we could, in jus- 
tice to you and ourselves, see the matter in another 
light. We are returning the manuscript to you, and 
we remain, with appreciation of your courtesy, etc.” 

Paige Ticknor’s Sons — “We have given very care- 
ful consideration to your story, ‘The Audit at Stori- 
sende,’ which you kindly submitted to us. We were 
much interested in this romance, for it goes without 
saying that it is marked with high literary quality. 
But we feel that it would not appeal with force and 
success to the general reader. Its appeal, we think, 
would be to the small class of cultured readers, and 
therefore its publication would not be attended with 
commercial success. Therefore in your interest, as 
well as our own, we feel that we must give an un- 
favorable decision upon the question of publication. 


OF PUBLISHING 


59 


Naturally we regret to be forced to that conclusion, for 
the work is one which would be creditable to any pub- 
lisher’s list. We return the manuscript by express, 
with our appreciation of your courtesy in giving us 
the opportunity of considering it, and are, etc.” 

And so it was with The Gayvery Company, and 
with Leeds, McKibble & Todd, and with Stuyvesant 
& Brothers. Unanimously they united to praise and 
to return the manuscript. And Kennaston began 
reluctantly to suspect that, for all their polite phrases 
about literary excellence, his romance must, some- 
how, be not quite in consonance with the standards 
of that person who is, after all, the final arbiter of 
literature, and to whom these publishers very prop* 
erly deferred, as “the general reader.” And Ken- 
naston wondered if it would not be well for him, 
also, to study the all-important and exigent require- 
ments of “the general reader.” 

Kennaston turned to the publishers' advertise- 
ments. Dapley & Pildriff at that time were urging 
every one to read White Sepulchers , the author of 
which had made public the momentous discovery 
that all churchgoers were not immaculate persons. 
Paige Ticknor’s Sons were announcing a “revised 
version” of The Apostates , — by Kennaston’s own 
loathed first-cousin, — which was guaranteed to sear 
the soul to its core, more than rival Thackeray, 


60 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


and turn our highest social circles inside out. Then 
the Gayvery Company offered Through the Transom, 
a daring study of “feminism,” compiled to all ap- 
pearance under rather novel conditions, inasmuch as 
the brilliant young author had, according to the ad- 
vertisements, written every sentence with his jaws 
set and his soul on fire. The majority of Leeds, 
McKibble & Todd’s adjectives were devoted to 
Sarah's Secret, the prize-winner in the firm’s $15,000 
contest — a “sprightly romance of the greenwood,” 
whose undoubted aim, Kennaston deduced from ten- 
tative dips into its meandering balderdash, was to 
become the most sought-after book in all institutes 
devoted to care of the feeble-minded. And Stuy- 
vesant & Brothers were superlatively acclaiming 
The Silent Brotherhood, the latest masterpiece of a 
pornographically gifted genius, who had edifyingly 
shown that he ranked religion above literature, by 
retiring from the ministry to write novels. 

Kennaston laughed — upon which side of the 
mouth, it were too curious to inquire. Momen- 
tarily he thought of printing the book at his own 
expense. But here the years of poverty had left 
indelible traces. Kennaston had too often walked 
because he had not carfare, for a dollar ever again 
to seem to him an inconsiderable matter. Com- 
fortably reassured as to pecuniary needs for the 


OF PUBLISHING 


61 


future, he had not the least desire to control more 
money than actually showed in his bank-balances: 
but, even so, he often smiled to note how unwillingly 
he spent money. So now he shrugged, and sent out 
his loved romance again. 

An unlikely thing happened: the book was ac- 
cepted for publication. The Baxon-Muir Com- 
pany had no prodigious faith in The Audit at St oris - 
ende , as a commercial venture; but their “readers,” 
in common with most of the “readers” for the firms 
who had rejected it, were not lacking in discernment 
of its merits as an admirable piece of writing. And 
the more optimistic among them protested even to 
foresee a possibility of the book’s selling. The vast 
public that reads for pastime, they contended, was 
beginning to grow a little tired of being told how bad 
was this-or-that economic condition : and pretty 
much everything had been “daringly exposed,” to 
the point of weariness, from the inconsistencies of 
our clergy to the uncleanliness of our sausage. In 
addition, they considered the surprising success of 
Mr. Marmaduke Fennel’s eighteenth-century story, 
For Love of a Lady, as compared with the more 
moderate sales of Miss Elspeth Lancaster’s In Scar- 
let Sidon, that candid romance of the brothel; de- 
ducing therefrom that the “gadzooks” and “by’r 


62 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


lady” type of reading-matter was ready to revive in 
vogue. At all events, the Baxon-Muir Company, 
after holding a rather unusual number of confer- 
ences, declared their willingness to publish this book ; 
and in due course they did publish it. 

There were before this, however, for Kennaston 
many glad hours of dabbling with proof-sheets: 
the tale seemed so different, and so infernally good, 
in. print. Kennaston never in his life found any 
other playthings comparable to those first wide- 
margined “galley proofs” of The Audit at St oris- 
ende. Here was the word, vexatiously repeated 
within three lines, which must be replaced by a 
synonym; and the clause which, when transposed, 
made the whole sentence gain in force and comeli- 
ness; and the curt sentence whose addition gave 
clarity to the paragraph, much as a pinch of alum 
clears turbid water; and the vaguely unsatisfactory 
adjective, for which a jet of inspiration suggested 
a substitute, of vastly different meaning, in the light 
of whose inevitable aptness you marveled over your 
preliminary obtuseness: — all these slight triumphs, 
one by one, first gladdened Kennaston’s labor and 
tickled his self-complacency. He could see no fault 
in the book. 

His publishers had clearer eyes. His Preface, 
for one matter, they insisted on transposing to the 


OF PUBLISHING 


63 


rear of the volume, where it now figures as the 
book’s tolerably famous Colophon — that curious 
exposition of Kennaston’s creed as artist. Then, 
for a title, The Audit at Storisende was editorially 
adjudged abominable: people would not know how 
to pronounce Storisende, and in consequence would 
hold back from discussing the romance or even ask- 
ing for it at book-dealers. Men Who Loved Ettarre 
was Kennaston’s ensuing suggestion ; but the Baxon- 
Muir Company showed no fixed confidence in their 
patrons’ ability to pronounce Ettarre, either. Would 
it not be possible, they inquired, to change the hero- 
ine’s name ? — and Kennaston assented. Thus it was 
that in the end his book came to be called Men Who 
Loved Alison. 

But to Kennaston her name stayed always Et- 
tarre. . . . 

The book was delivered to the world, which re- 
ceived the gift without excitement. The book was 
delivered to reviewers, who found in it a well-inten- 
tioned echo of Mr. Maurice Hewlett’s earlier 
mediaeval tales. And there for a month or some six 
weeks, the matter rested. 

Then one propitious morning an indignant gen- 
tlewoman in Brooklyn wrote to The New York 
Sphere a letter which was duly printed in that jour- 
nal’s widely circulated Sunday supplement, The 


64 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


Literary Masterpieces of This Week , to denounce 
the loathsome and depraved indecency of the nine- 
teenth and twentieth chapters, in which — while treat- 
ing of Sir Guiron’s imprisonment in the Sacred 
Grove of Caer Idryn, and the worship accorded 
there to the sigil of Scoteia — Kennaston had touched 
upon some of the perverse refinements of antique 
sexual relations. The following week brought 
forth a full page of letters. Two of these, as Ken- 
naston afterward learned, were contributed by the 
“publicity man” of the Baxon-Muir Company, and 
all arraigned obscenities which Kennaston could 
neither remember nor on re-reading his book dis- 
cover. Later in this journal, as in other newspapers, 
appeared still more denunciations. An up-to-the- 
minute bishop expostulated from the pulpit against 
the story’s vicious tendencies, demanding that it be 
suppressed. Thereafter it was no longer on sale in 
the large department-stores alone, but was equally 
procurable at all the bookstands in hotels and railway 
stations. Even the author’s acquaintances began to 
read it. And the Delaunays (then at the height of 
their vogue as exponents of the “new” dances) in- 
troduced “the Alison amble”; and from Tampa to 
Seattle, in certain syndicated cartoons of generally 
appealing idiocy, newspaper readers were privileged 
to see one hero of the series knock the other heels 


OF PUBLISHING 


65 


over head with a copy of Kennaston’s romance. 
And women wore the “Alison aigrette” for a whole 
season ; and a new brand of cheap tobacco christened 
in her honor had presently made her name at least 
familiar in saloons. Men Who Loved Alison be- 
came, in fine, the novel of the hour. It was one of 
those rare miracles such as sometimes palm off a 
well-written book upon the vast public that reads for 
pastime. 

And shortly afterward Mr. Booth Tarkington 
published another of his delightful romances: one 
forgets at this distance of time just which it was: 
but, like- all the others, it was exquisitely done, and 
sold neck and neck with Men Who Loved Alison; 
so that for a while it looked almost as if the Ameri- 
can reading public was coming to condone adroit and 
careful composition. 

But presently the advertising columns of maga- 
zines and newspapers were heralding the year’s ver- 
nal output of enduring masterworks in the field of 
fiction : and readers were again assured that the great 
American novel had just been published at last, by 
any number of persons : and so, the autumnal prede- 
cessors of these new chefs d’ceuvre passed swiftly 
into oblivion, via the brief respite of a “popular” 
edition. And naturally, Kennaston’s romance war 
forgotten, by all save a few pensive people. Som<e 


66 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


of them had found in this volume food for curious 
speculation. 

That, however, is a matter to be taken up later. 


13 - 

Suggesting Themes of Universal Appeal 


S O Felix Kennaston saw his dream vulgarized, 
made a low byword ; and he contemplated this 
travestying, as the cream of a sardonic jest, 
with urbanity. Indeed, that hour of notoriety 
seemed not without its pleasant features to Felix 
Kennaston, who had all a poet’s ordinary appetite for 
flattery. Besides, it was droll to read the “literary 
notes” which the Baxon-Muir people were indus- 
triously disseminating, by means of the daily jour- 
nals, as to this Felix Kennaston’s personality, an- 
cestry, accomplishments, recreations and preferences 
in diet. And then, in common with the old woman 
famed in nursery rhyme, he was very often wont 
to observe, “But, lawk a mercy on me ! this is none 
of I!” 

It was droll, too, to be asked for autographs, lec- 
tures, and for donations of “your wonderful novel.” 
It was droll to receive letters from remote mysterious 
persons, who had read his book, and had liked it, or 
67 


68 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


else had disliked it to the point of .being goaded into 
epistolary remonstrance, sarcasm, abuse, and (as a 
rule) erratic spelling. It troubled. Kennaston that 
only riffraff seemed to have read his book, so far as 
he could judge from these unsolicited communica- 
tions ; and that such people of culture and education 
as might have been thrilled by it — all people whose 
opinions he might conceivably value — seemed never 
to write to authors. . . . 

And finally, it was droll to watch his wife’s re- 
ception of the book. To Kennaston his wife stayed 
always a not unfriendly mystery. She now could not 
but be a little taken aback by this revelation of his 
abilities, he reflected — with which she had lived so 
long without, he felt, appreciation of them — but cer- 
tainly she would never admit to either fact. He 
doubted very much if Kathleen would ever actually 
read Men Who Loved Alison; on various pretexts 
she had deferred the pleasure, and seemed, with per- 
verted notions of humor, to esteem it a joke that 
she alone had not read the book of which every- 
body was talking. Such was not Kennaston’s idea 
of humor, or of wifely interest. But Kathleen 
dipped into the volume here and there; and she 
assuredly read all the newspaper-notices sent in by 
the clipping-bureau. These she considered with 
profound seriousness. 


THEMES OF UNIVERSAL APPEAL 


69 


“I have been thinking — you ought to make a 
great deal out of your next novel/’ she said, one 
morning, over her grapefruit; and the former poet 
wondered why, in heaven’s name, it should matter 
to her whether or not the marketing of his dreams 
earned money, when they had already a competence. 
But women were thus fashioned. . . . 

“You ought to do something more up-to-date, 
though, Felix, something that deals with real life — ” 

“Ah, but I don’t particularly care to write about 
a subject of which I am so totally ignorant, dear. 
Besides, it isn’t for you to fleer and gibe at a mas- 
terpiece which you never read,” he airily informed 
her. 

“I am saving it up for next summer, Felix, when 
I will have a chance to give every word of it the 
reverence it deserves. I really don’t have any time 
for reading nowadays. There is always something 
more important that has to be attended to — For 
instance, the gasoline engine isn’t working again, 
and I had to ’phone in town for Slaytor to send a 
man out to-day, to see what is the matter this time.” 

“And it is messy things like that you want me 
to write about !” he exclaimed. “About the gasoline 
engine going on another strike, and Drake’s for- 
getting to tell you we were all out of sugar until late 
Saturday night! Never mind, Mrs. Kennaston! 


70 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


you will be sorry for this, and you will weep the 
bitter tears of unavailing repentance, some day, 
when you ride in the front automobile with the Gov- 
ernor to the unveiling of my various monuments, 
and have fallen into the anecdotage of a great man’s 
widow.” He spoke lightly, but he was reflecting 
that in reality Kathleen did not read his book be- 
cause she did not regard any of his doings very 
‘seriously. “Isn’t this the third time this week we 
have had herring for breakfast?” he inquired, pleas- 
antly. “I think I will wait and let them scramble 
me a couple of eggs. It is evidently a trifle that has 
escaped your attention, my darling, during our long 
years of happy married life, that I don’t eat herring. 
But of course, just as you say, you have a number 
of much more important things than husbands to 
think about. I dislike having to put any one to any 
extra trouble on my account; but as it happens, I 
have a lot of work to do this morning, and I cannot 
very well get through it on an empty stomach.” 

“We haven’t had it since Saturday, Felix.” Then 
wearily, to the serving-girl, “Cora, see if Mr. Ken- 
naston can have some eggs. ... I wish you 
wouldn’t upset things so, Felix. Your coffee will 
get stone-cold ; and it is hard enough to keep servants 
as it is. Besides, you know perfectly well to-day is 


THEMES OF UNIVERSAL APPEAL 


71 


Thursday, and the library has to be thorough- 
cleaned.” 

“That means of course I am to be turned out-of- 
doors and forced to waste a whole day somewhere 
in town. It is quite touching how my creature com- 
forts are catered to in this house !” 

And Kathleen began to laugh, ruefully. “You 
are just a great big baby, Felix. You are sulking 
and swelling up like a frog, because you think I 
don’t appreciate what a wonderful husband I have 
and what a wonderful book he has written.” 

Then Kennaston began to laugh also. He knew 
that what she said was tolerably true, even to the 
batrachian simile. “When you insisted on adopting 
me, dear, you ought to have realized what you were 
letting yourself in for.” 

“ — And I do think,” Kathleen went on, evincing 
that conviction with which she as a rule repeated 
other people’s remarks — “that you ought to make 
your next book something that deals with real life. 
Men Who Loved Alison is beautifully written and 
all that, but, exactly as the Tucson Pioneer said, it is 
really just colorful soapbubbly nonsense.” 

“Ah, but is it unadulterated nonsense, Kathleen, 
that somewhere living may be a uniformly noble 
transaction?” he debated — “and human passions 


72 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


never be in a poor way to find expression with ade- 
quate speech and action ?” Pleased with the phrase, 
and feeling in a better temper, he began to butter 
a roll. 

“I don’t know about that; but, in any event, peo- 
ple prefer to read about the life they are familiar 
with.” 

“You touch on a disheartening truth. People 
never want to be told anything they do not believe al- 
ready. Yet I quite fail to see why, in books or 
elsewhere, any one should wish to be reminded of 
what human life is actually like. For living is the 
one art in which mankind has never achieved distinc- 
tion. It is perhaps an obscure sense of this that 
makes us think the begetting of mankind an un- 
discussable subject, and death a sublime and edifying 
topic.” 

“Yes — ? I dare say,” Kathleen assented vaguely. 
“This herring is really very good, Felix. I think 
you would like it, if you just had not made up your 
mind to be stubborn about it — ” Then she spoke 
with new animation : “Felix, Margaret Woods was 
in Louvet’s yesterday morning, having her hair 
done for a dinner they gave the railroad crowd last 
night, and of all the faded washed-out looking people 
I ever saw — ! And I can remember her having that 
hideous brown dress long before she was married. 


THEMES OF UNIVERSAL APPEAL 


73 


Of course, it doesn’t make any difference to me that 
she didn’t see fit to invite us. She was one of your 
friends, not mine. I was only thinking that, since 
she always pretended to be so fond of you, it does 
seem curious the way we are invariably left out.” 

So Kennaston did not embroider verbally his 
theme — of Living Adequately — as he had felt him- 
self in vein to do could he have found a listener. 

‘‘Some day,” he ruefully reflected, “I shall cer- 
tainly write a paper upon The Lost Art of Conver- 
sing with One’s Wife. Its appeal, I think, would be 
universal.” 

Then his eggs came. . . . 


14 . 

Peculiar Conduct of a Personage 


S HORTLY afterward befell a queer incident. 
Kennaston, passing through a famed city, 
lunched with a personage who had been pleased 
to admire Men Who Loved Alison , and whose re- 
munerative admiration had been skilfully trumpeted 
in the public press by Kennaston’s publishers. 

There were some ten others in the party, and 
Kennaston found it droll enough to be sitting at 
table with them. The lean pensive man — with hair 
falling over his forehead in a neatly-clipped “bang,” 
such as custom restricts to children — had probably 
written that morning, in his official capacity, to in- 
numerable potentates. That handsome bluff old 
navy-officer was a national hero: he would rank in 
history with Perry and John Paul Jones; yet here 
he sat, within arms’-reach, prosaically complaining 
of unseasonable weather. That bearded man, rubi- 
cund and monstrous as to nose, was perhaps the 
most powerful, as he was certainly the most wealthy, 
74 


PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A PERSONAGE 75 


person inhabiting flesh; and it was rumored, in 
those Arcadian days, that kingdoms nowhere might 
presume to go to war without securing the consent 
of this financier. 

And that exquisitely neat fellow, looking like a 
lad unconvincingly made-up for an octogenarian in 
amateur theatricals, was the premier of the largest 
province in the world: his thin-featured neighbor 
was an aeronaut — at this period really a rara avis — 
and went above the clouds to get his livelihood, just 
as ordinary people went to banks and offices. And 
chief of all, their multifarious host — the personage, 
as one may discreetly call him — had left unattempted 
scarcely any role in the field of human activities: 
as ranchman, statesman, warrior, historian, editor, 
explorer, athlete, coiner of phrases, and re-discov- 
erer of the Decalogue, impartially, he had labored 
to make the world a livelier place of residence; and 
already he was the pivot of as many legends as 
Charlemagne or Arthur. 

The famous navy-officer, as has been said, was 
complaining of the weather. “The seasons have 
changed so, since I can remember. We seem to go 
straight from winter into summer nowadays.” 

“It has been rather unseasonable,” assented the 
financier; “but then you always feel the heat so 
much more during the first few hot days.” 


76 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


“Besides,” came the judicious comment, “it has 
not been the heat which was so oppressive this morn- 
ing, I think, as the great amount of humidity in 
the air.” 

“Yes, it is most unpleasant — makes your clothes 
stick to you so.” 

“Ah, but don’t you find, now,” asked the premier 
gaily, “that looking at the thermometer tends to 
make you feel, really, much more uncomfortable 
than if you stayed uninformed as to precisely how 
hot it was?” 

“Well! where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be 
wise, as I remember to have seen stated somewhere.” 

“By George, though, it is wonderful how true 
are many of those old sayings!” observed the per- 
sonage. “We assume we are much wiser than 
our fathers : but I doubt if we really are, in the big 
things that count.” 

“In fact, I have often wondered what George 
Washington, for example, would think of the re- 
public he helped to found, if he could see it nowa- 
days.” 

“He would probably find it very different from 
what he imagined it would be.” 

“Why, he would probably turn in his grave, at 
some of our newfangled notions — such as prohibi- 
tion and equal suffrage.” 


PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A PERSONAGE 77 


“Oh, well, all sensible people know, of course, 
that the trouble with prohibition is that it does not 
prohibit, and that woman’s place is the home, not 
in the mire of politics.” 

“That is admirably put, sir, if you will permit 
me to say so. Still, there is a great deal to be said 
on both sides.” 

“And after all, is there not a greater menace to 
the ideals of Washington and Jefferson in the way 
our present laws tend uniformly to favor rich peo- 
ple?” 

“There you have it, sir — to-day we punish the 
poor man for doing what the rich man does with 
entire impunity, only on a larger scale.” 

“By George, there are many of our so-called 
captains of industry who, if the truth were told, 
and a shorter and uglier word were not unpermis- 
sive, are little better than malefactors of great 
wealth.” 

This epigram, however heartily admired, was felt 
by many of the company to be a bit daring in the 
presence of the magnate: and the lean secretary 
spoke hastily, or at any rate, in less leisurely tones 
than usual: 

“After all, money is not everything. The richest 
people are not always the happiest, in spite of their 
luxury.” 


f8 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


“You gentlemen can take it from me,” asserted 
the aeronaut, “that many poor people get a lot of 
pleasure out of life.” 

“Now, really though, that reminds me — children 
are very close observers, and, as you may have 
noticed, they ask the most remarkable questions. My 
little boy asked me, only last Tuesday, why poor 
people are always so polite and kind — ” 

“Well, little pitchers have big ears — ” 

“What you might call a chip of the old block, eh ? 
— so that mighty little misses him?” 

“I may be prejudiced, but I thought it pretty good, 
coming from a kid of six — ” 

“And it is perfectly true, gentlemen — the poor 
are kind to each other. Now, I believe just being 
kind makes you happier — ” 

“And I often think that is a better sort of religion 
than just dressing up in your best clothes and going 
to church regularly on Sundays — ” 

“That is a very true thought,” another chimed 
in. 

“And expressed, upon my word, with admirable 
clarity — ” 

“Oh, whatever pretended pessimists in search of 
notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at 
heart — ” 

“I would put it that Christianity, in spite of the 


PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A PERSONAGE 79 


carping sneers of science so-called, has led us once 
for all to recognize the vast brotherhood of man — ” 
“So that, really, the world gets better every day — ” 
“We have quite abolished war, for instance — ” 
“My dear sir, were there nothing else, and even 
putting aside the outraged sentiments of civilized 
humanity, another great or prolonged war between 
any two of the leading nations is unthinkable — ” 
“For the simple reason, gentlemen, that we have 
perfected our fighting machines to such an extent 
that the destruction involved would be too fright- 
ful— 

“Then, too, we are improving the automobile to 
such an extent — ” 

“Oh, in the end it will inevitably supplant the 
horse — ” 

“It seems almost impossible to realize how we 
ever got along without the automobile — ” 

“Do you know, I would not be surprised if some 
day horses were exhibited in museums — ” 

“As rare and nearly extinct animals ? Come, now, 
that is pretty good — ” 

“And electricity is, as one might say, just in its 
infancy — ” 

“The telephone, for instance — our ancestors 
would not have believed in the possibilities of such a 
thing — ” 


80 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


“And, by George, they talk of giving an entire 
play with those moving-picture machines — acting the 
whole thing out, you know.” 

“Oh, yes, we live in the biggest, brainiest age the 
world has ever known — ” 

“And America is going to be the greatest nation 
in it, before very long, commercially and in every 
way . . 

So the talk flowed on, with Felix Kennaston con- 
tributing very little thereto. Indeed, Felix Ken- 
naston, the dreamer, was rather ill-at-ease among 
these men of action, and listened to their observa- 
tions with perturbed attention. He sat among 
the great ones of earth — not all of them the very 
greatest, of course, but each a person of quite re- 
spectable importance. It was the sort of gathering 
that in boyhood — and in later life also, for that 
matter — he had foreplanned to thrill and dazzle, as 
he perfectly recollected. But now, with the oppor- 
tunity, he somehow could not think of anything quite 
suitable to say — of anything which would at once do 
him justice and be admiringly received. 

Therefore he attempted to even matters by assur- 
ing himself that the talk of these efficient people was 
lacking in brilliance and real depth, and expressed 
sentiments which, microscopically viewed, did not 
appear to be astoundingly original. If these had 


PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A PERSONAGE 81 


been less remarkable persons he would have thought 
their conversation almost platitudinous. And not 
one of them, however distinguished, or whatever else 
he might have done, could have written Men Who 
Loved Alison ! Kennaston cherished that reflection 
as he sedately partook of a dish he recollected to 
have seen described, on menu cards, as “Hungarian 
goulash” and sipped sherry of no very extraordinary 
flavor. . . . 

He was to remember how plain the fare was, and 
more than once, was to refer to this meal — quite 
casually — through a “That reminds me of what 
Such-an-one said once, when I was lunching with 
him,” or perhaps, “The last time I lunched with So- 
and-so, I remember — ” With such gambits he was 
to begin, later, to introduce to us of Lichfield divers 
anecdotes which, if rather pointless, were at least 
garnished with widely-known names. 

There was a Cabinet meeting that afternoon, and 
luncheon ended, the personage wasted scant time in 
dismissing his guests. 

“It has been a very great pleasure to meet you, 
Mr. Kennaston;” quoth the personage, wringing 
Kennaston’s hand. 

Kennaston suitably gave him to understand that 
they shared ecstasy in common. But all the while 
Kennaston was, really, thinking that here before 


82 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


him, half-revealed, shone the world-famous teeth 
portrayed by cartoonists in the morning-paper every 
day, everywhere. Yes, they were remarkable teeth 
— immaculate, marmoreal and massive, — and they 
were so close-set that Kennaston was now smitten 
with an idiotic desire to ask their owner if the per- 
sonage could get dental floss between them. . . . 

“Those portions of your book relating to the sigil 
of Scoteia struck me as being too explicit,” the 
personage continued/ bluffly, but in lowered tones. 
The two stood now, beneath a great stuffed elk's 
head, a little apart from the others. “Do you think 
it was quite wise? I seem to recall a phrase — about 
birds — ” 

Kennaston’s thoughts remained, as yet, dental. 
But there is no denying Kennaston was perturbed. 
Nor was he less puzzled when, as if in answer to 
Kennaston’s bewildered look, the personage pro- 
duced from his waistcoat pocket a small square 
mirror, which he half-exhibited, but retained se- 
cretively in the palm of his hand. “Yes, the hurt 
may well be two- fold — I am pre-supposing that, as 
a country-gentleman, you have raised white pigeons, 
Mr. Kennaston?” he said, meaningly. 

“Why, no, they keep up such a maddening cooing 
and purring on warm days, and drum so on tin 
roofs” — Kennaston stammered — “that I long ago 


PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A PERSONAGE 83 


lost patience with the birds of Venus, whatever the 
tincture c i their plumage. There used to be any 
number of them on our place, though — ” 

‘‘Ah, well/’ the personage said, with a wise nod, 
and with more teeth than ever, “you exercise a 
privilege common to all of us — and my intended 
analogy falls through. In any event, it has been a 
great pleasure to meet you. Come and see me again, 
Mr. Kennaston — and meanwhile, think over what I 
have said.” 

And that was all. Kennaston returned to Ab 
cluid in a whirl of formless speculations. The 
mirror and the insane query as to white pigeons 
could not, he considered, but constitute some pass- 
word to which Kennaston had failed to give the 
proper response. 

The mystery had some connection with what he 
had written in his book as to the sigil of Scoteia. 

. . . And he could not find he had written anything 
very definite. The broken disk was spoken of as a 
talisman in the vague terms best suited to a discus- 
sion of talismans by a person who knew nothing 
much about them. True, the book told what the 
talisman looked like; it looked like that bit of 
metal he had picked up in the garden. . . . He won- 
dered if he had thrown away that bit of metal; and, 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


84 


searching, discovered it in the desk drawer, where 
it had lain for several months. 

Laid by the lamp, it shone agreeably as Ken- 
naston puckered his protruding heavy brows over 
the characters with which it was inscribed. That 
was what the sigil looked like — or, rather, what half 
the sigil looked like, because Ettarre still had the 
other half. How could the personage have known 
anything about it? unless there were, indeed, really 
some secret and some password through which men 
won to place and the world’s prizes? . . . Blurred 
memories of Eugene Sue’s nefarious Jesuits and of 
Balzac’s redoubtable Thirteen arose in the back- 
ground of his mental picturings. . . . 

No, the personage had probably been tasting bev- 
erages more potent than sherry; there were wild 
legends, since disproved, such as seemed then to 
excuse that supposition: or perhaps he was insane, 
and nobody but Felix Kennaston knew it. . . . 
What could a little mirror, much less pigeons, have 
to do with this bit of metal? — except that this bit 
of metal, too, reflected light so that the strain tired 
your eyes, thus steadily to look down upon the 
thing. . . . 


1 5 - 

Of V ain Regret and Wonder in the Dark 

\ ADAM >” h e was insanely stating, “I 
IV/ 1 would not for the world set up as a fit 
exponent for the mottoes of a copybook ; 
but I am not all base.” 

“You are,” flashed she, “a notorious rogue.” 

It was quite dark. Kennaston could not see the 
woman with whom he was talking. But they were 
in an open paved place, like a courtyard, and he was 
facing the great shut door against which she stood, 
vaguely discernible. He knew they were waiting 
for some one to open this door. It seemed to him, 
for no reason at all, that they were at Tunbridge 
Wells. But there was no light anywhere. Complete 
darkness submerged them ; the skies showed not one 
glimmer. 

“That I am of smirched repute, madam, I lack 
both grounds and inclination to deny. Yet I am 
not so through choice. Believe me, I am innately 
85 


86 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


a lover of all bodily comforts : so, by preference, an 
ill name is as obnoxious to me as — shall we say? — 
soiled linen or a coat of last year’s cut. But then, 
que voulez-vous? as our lively neighbors observe. 
Squeamishness was never yet bred in an empty 
pocket; and I am- thus compelled to the commis- 
sion of divers profitable peccadilloes, once in a blue 
moon, by the dictates of that same haphazard chance 
which to-night has pressed me into the service of 
innocence and virtue.” 

She kept silence; and he went on in lightheaded 
wonder as to what this dream, so plainly recognized 
as such, was all about, and as to whence came the 
words which sprang so nimbly to his lips, and as to 
what was the cause of his great wistful sorrow. 
Perhaps if he listened very attentively to what he 
was saying, he might find out. 

“You do not answer, madam. Yet think a little. 
I am a notorious rogue: the circumstance is con- 
ceded. But do you think I have selfishly become 
so in quest of amusement? Nay, I can assure you 
that Newgate, the wigged judge, the jolting cart, 
the gallows, blend in no pleasant dreams. . . . But 
what choice had I ? Cast forth to the gutter’s mir- 
ing in the susceptible years of infancy, a girl of the 
town’s byblow, what choice had I, in heaven’s name? 
If I may not live as I would, I must live as I may; 


VAIN REGRET AND WONDER 


87 


in emperors and parsons and sewer-diggers and 
cheese-mites that claim is equally allowed.” 

“You are a thief?” she asked, pensively. 

“Let us put it, rather, that I have proved in 
life’s hard school an indifferent Latinist, by occa- 
sionally confounding tuum with meum ” 

“A murderer?” 

“Something of the sort might be my description in 
puritanic mouths. You know at least what hap- 
pened at The Cat and Hautbois.” 

(“But what in the world had happened there?” 
Kennaston wondered.) 

“And yet — ” The sweet voice marveled. 

“And yet I have saved you from Lord Umfra- 
ville? Ah, madam, Providence labors with quaint 
instruments, dilapidating Troy by means of a wood 
rocking-horse, and loosing sin into the universe 
through a half-eaten apple. Nay, I repeat, I am not 
all base ; and I have read somewhere that those who 
are in honor wholly shipwrecked will yet very often 
cling desperately to one stray spar of virtue.” 

He could tell her hand had raised to the knocker 
on the closed door. “Mr. Vanringham, will you 
answer me a question ?” 

“A thousand. (.S0 I am Vanringham.)” 

“I have not knocked. I possess, as you know, 
a considerable fortune in my own right. It would 


88 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


be easy for a strong man — and, sure, your shoul- 
ders are prodigiously broad, Mr. Cut-throat ! — very 
easy for him to stifle my cries and carry me away, 
even now. And then, to preserve my honor, I would 
have no choice save to marry that broad-shouldered 
man. Is this not truth ?” 

“It is the goddess herself, newly stolen from her 
well. O dea certe!” 

“I am not absolutely hideous, either?” she queried, 
absent-mindedly. 

“Dame Venus,” Kennaston observed, “may have 
made a similar demand of the waves at Cythera 
when she first rose among their billows : and 
I doubt not that the white foaming waters, amor- 
ously clutching at her far whiter feet, laughed and 
murmured the answer I would give did I not know 
your question was put in a spirit of mockery.” 

“And yet — ” she re-began. 

“And yet, I resist all these temptations? Frankly, 
had you been in my eyes less desirable, madam, you 
would not have reached home thus uneventfully; for 
a rich marriage is the only chance adapted to repair 
my tattered fortunes; and the devil is cunning to 
avail himself of our flesh's frailty. Had you been 
the fat widow of some City knight, I would have 
played my lord of Umfraville’s part, upon my pet- 
tier scale. Or, had I esteemed it possible for me to 


VAIN REGRET AND WONDER 


89 


have done with my old life, I would have essayed 
to devote a cleaner existence to your service and wor- 
ship. Indeed, indeed, I speak the truth, however 
jestingly!” he said, with sudden wildness. “But 
what would you have? I would not entrust your 
fan, much less your happiness, to the keeping of a 
creature so untrustworthy as I know myself to be. 
In fine, I look upon you, madam, in such a rapture of 
veneration and tenderness and joy and heartbreak- 
ing yearning, that it is necessary I get very tipsy 
to-night, and strive to forget that I, too, might have 
lived cleanlily.” 

And Kennaston, as he spoke thus, engulfed in 
darkness, knew it was a noble sorrow which pos- 
sessed him — a stingless wistful sorrow such as is 
aroused by the unfolding of a well-acted tragedy 
or the progress of a lofty music. This ruffian long- 
ing, quite hopelessly, to be made clean again, so wor- 
shipful of his loved lady’s purity and loveliness, and 
knowing loveliness and purity to be forever unat- 
tainable in his mean life, was Felix Kennaston, 
somehow. . . . What was it Maugis d’Aigremont 
had said? — “I have been guilty of many wicked- 
nesses, I have held much filthy traffic such as my soul 
loathed; and yet, I swear to you, I seem to myself 
to be still the boy who once was I.” Kennaston un- 
derstood now, for the first time with deep reality, 


90 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


what his puppet had meant ; and how a man’s deeds 
in the flesh may travesty the man himself. 

But the door opened. Confusedly Kennaston was 
aware of brilliantly-lighted rooms beyond, of the 
chatter of gay people, of thin tinkling music, and, 
more immediately, of two lackeys, much bepowdered 
as to their heads, and stately in new liveries of blue- 
and-silver. Confusedly he noted these things, for 
the woman had paused in the bright doorway, and 
all the loveliness of Ettarre was visible now, and 
she had given a delighted cry of recognition. 

“La, it is Horvendile ! and we are having the same 
dream again!” 

This much he heard and saw as her hand went out 
toward him. gladly. Then as she touched him the 
universe seemed to fold about Felix Kennaston, just 
as a hand closes, and he was sitting at the writing- 
table in the library, with a gleaming scrap of metal 
before him. 

He sat thus for a long while. 

“I can make nothing of all this. I remember of 
course that I saw Muriel Allardyce stand very much 
like that, in the doorway of the Royal Hotel, at the 
Green Chalybeate — and how many years ago, good 
Lord ! . . . And equally of course the most plausible 
explanation is that I am losing my wits. Or, elsSv 


VAIN REGRET AND WONDER 


91 


it may be that I am playing blindfold with perilous 
matters. Felix Kennaston, my friend, the safest 
plan — the one assuredly safe plan for you — would 
be to throw away this devil’s toy, and forget it com- 
pletely. . . . And, I will, too — the very first thing 
to-morrow morning — or after I have had a few 
days to think it over, any way. . . 

But even as he made this compact it was with- 
out much lively faith in his promises. 



BOOK THIRD 


" Come to me in my dreams, and then 
By day I shall he well again! 

For then the night will more than pay 
The hopeless longing of long day. 

“Come, as thou earnest a thousand times , 
A messenger from lovelier climes, 

To smile on our drear world, and he 
As kind to others as to me!” 




They Gome to a High Place 


H E was looking down at the most repulsive 
old woman he had ever seen. Hers was the 
abhorrent fatness of a spider; her flesh ap- 
peared to have the coloring and consistency of 
dough. She sat upon the stone pavement, knitting; 
her eyes, which raised to his unblinkingly, were 
black, secretive, and impersonally malevolent; and 
her jaws stirred without ceasing, in a loose chewing 
motion, so that the white hairs, rooted in the. big 
mole on her chin, twitched and glittered in the sun- 
light. 

"‘But one does not pay on entering,” she was say- 
ing. “One pays as one goes out. It is the rule.” 

“And what do you knit, mother?” Kennaston 
asked her. 

“Eh, I shall never know until God's funeral is 
preached,” the old woman said. “I only know it is 
forbidden me to stop.” 


95 


96 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


So he went past her, aware that through some 
nameless grace the girl whom he had twice seen in 
dreams awaited him there, and that the girl’s face 
was the face of Ettarre. She stood by a stone 
balustrade, upon which squatted tall stone monsters 
— weird and haphazard collocations, as touched an- 
atomy, of bird and brute and fiend — and she in 
common with these hobgoblins looked down upon a 
widespread comely city. The time was a bright and 
windy morning in spring; and the sky, unclouded, 
was like an inverted cup which did not merely roof 
Ettarre and the man who had come back to her, but 
inclosed them in incommunicable isolation. To the 
left, beyond shimmering tree-tops, so far beneath 
them that it made Felix Kennaston dizzy to look, 
the ruffling surface of a river gleamed. ... It was 
in much this fashion, he recalled, that Ettarre and 
Horvendile had stood alone together among the 
turrets of Storisende. 

‘‘But now I wonder where on the face of — or, 
rather, so far above the face of what especial planet 
we may happen to be ?” Kennaston marveled happily 
— “or east of the sun or west of the moon? At all 
events, it hardly matters. Suffice it that we are in 
love’s land to-day. What need is there to worry 
over any one inexplicable detail, where everything 
is incomprehensible?” 


THEY COME TO A HIGH PLACE 


97 


“I was never here before, Horvendile ; and I have 
waited for you so long.” 

He looked at her; and again his heart moved with 
glad adoration. It was not merely that Ettarre was 
so pleasing to the eye, and distinguished by so many 
delicate clarities of color — so young, so quick of 
movement, so slender, so shapely, so inexpressibly 
virginal — but the heady knowledge that here on 
dizzying heights he, Felix Kennaston, was somehow 
playing with superhuman matters, and that no power 
could induce him to desist from his delicious and 
perilous frolic, stirred, in deep recesses of his being, 
nameless springs. Nameless they must remain; for 
it was as though he had discovered himself to pos- 
sess a sixth sense; and he found that the contrivers 
of language, being less prodigally gifted, had never 
been at need to invent any terms wherewith to ex- 
press this sense’s gratification. But he knew that he 
was strong and admirable ; that men and men’s af- 
fairs lay far beneath him ; that Ettarre belonged to 
him; and, most vividly of all, that the exultance 
which possessed him was a by-product of an unstable 
dream. 

‘‘Yet it is not any city of to-day,” he was say- 
ing. “Look, how yonder little rascal glitters — he 
is wearing a helmet of some sort and a gorget. 
Why. all those pigmies, if you look closely, go in 


98 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


far braver scarlets and purples than we elect to skulk 
about in nowadays; and nowhere in sight is an 
office-building or an electric-light advertisement of 
chewing-gum. No, that hotchpotch of huddled ga- 
bles and parapets and towers shaped like lanterns 
was stolen straight out of some Dore illustration for 
Rabelais or Les Contes Drolatiques. But it does 
not matter at all, and it will never matter, where 
we may chance to be, Ettarre. What really and 
greatly matters, is that when I try to touch you 
everything vanishes.” 

The girl was frankly puzzled. “Yes, that seems 
a part of the sigh's magic. . . 


* 7 - 

Of the Sigil and One Use of It 


I T proved that this was indeed a part of the sigil’s 
wonder-working: Kennaston learned by experi- 
ence that whenever, even by accident, he was 
about to touch Ettarre his dream would end like a 
burst bubble. He would find himself alone and 
staring at the gleaming fragment of metal. 

Before long he also learned something concern- 
ing the sigil of Scoteia, of which this piece of metal 
once formed a part ; for it was permitted him to see 
the sigil in its entirety, many centuries before it 
was shattered : it was then one of the treasures of 
the Didascalion, a peculiar sort of girls’ school in 
King Ptolemy Physcon’s city of Alexandria, where 
women were tutored to honor fittingly the power 
which this sigil served. But it is not expedient to 
speak clearly concerning this ; and the real name of 
the sigil was, of course, quite different from that 
which Kennaston had given it in his romance. 

So began an odd divided life for Felix Kennas- 
99 


100 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


ton. At first he put his half of the sigil in an en- 
velope, which he hid in a desk in the library, under 
a pile of his dead uncle’s unused bookplates ; whence, 
when occasion served, it was taken out in order that 
when held so as to reflect the lamplight — for this 
was always necessary — it might induce the desired 
dream of Ettarre. 

Later Kennaston thought of an expedient by 
which to prolong his dreams. Nightly he lighted 
and set by his bedside a stump of candle. The tiny 
flame, after he had utilized its reflection, would 
harmlessly bum out while his body slept with a bit of 
metal in one hand; and he would be freed of Felix 
Kennaston for eight hours uninterruptedly. To 
have left an electric-light turned on until he awak- 
ened, would in the end have exposed him to detection 
and the not-impossible appointment of a commission 
in lunacy; and he recognized the potentialities of 
such mischance with frank distaste. As affairs sped, 
however, he could without great difficulty buy his 
candles in secret. He was glad now he was well-to- 
do, if only because, as an incidental result of ma- 
terially bettered fortunes, he and his wife had sepa- 
rate bedrooms. 


Treats of a Prelate and , in Part, of Pigeons 


T HE diurnal part of Kennaston’s life was 
largely devoted to writing The Tinctured Veil 
— that amazing performance which he sub- 
sequently gave to a bewildered world. And for the 
rest, his waking life went on in the old round. 

But this is not — save by way of an Occasional 
parenthesis — a chronicle of Felix Kennaston’s do- 
ings in the flesh. You may find all that in Mr. 
Froser’s Biography. Flippant, inefficient and 
moody, Felix Kennaston was not in the flesh par- 
ticularly engaging; and in writing this record it is 
necessary to keep his fat corporeal personality in the 
background as much as may be possible, lest this 
workaday mask, of unamiable flesh and mannerisms, 
should cause you, as it so often induced us of 
Lichfield, to find the man repellent, and nothing 
more. 

Now it befell that this spring died Bishop Ark- 
wright — of the Cathedral of the Bleeding Heart- 
101 


102 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


and many dignitaries of his faith journeyed to Lich- 
field to attend the funeral. Chief among these was 
i prelate who very long ago had lived in Lichfield, 
when he was merely a bishop. Kennaston was no 
little surprised to receive a note informing him that 
this eminent churchman would be pleased to see Mr. 
Felix Kennaston that evening at the Bishop’s House. 

The prelate sat alone in a sparsely furnished, 
rather dark, and noticeably dusty room. He was 
like a lean effigy carved in time-yellowed ivory, and 
his voice was curiously ingratiating. Kennaston 
recognized with joy that this old man talked like a 
person in a book, in completed sentences and picked 
phrases, instead of employing the fragmentary ver- 
bal shorthand of ordinary Lichfieldian conversation : 
and Kennaston, to whom the slovenliness of fairly 
cultured people’s daily talk was always a mystery 
and an irritant, fell with promptitude into the same 
tone. 

The prelate, it developed, had when he lived in 
Lichfield known Kennaston’s dead uncle — “for 
whom I had the highest esteem, and whose friend- 
ship I valued most dearly.” He hoped that Ken- 
naston would pardon the foibles of old age and over- 
look this trespass upon Kennaston’s time. For the 
prelate had, he said, really a personal interest in the 
only surviving relative of his dead friend. 


TREATS OF A PRELATE AND OF PIGEONS lCd 


‘‘There is a portrait of you, sir, in my library 
— very gorgeous, in full canonicals — just as my 
uncle left the room,” said Kennaston, all at sea. 
But the prelate had begun to talk — amiably, and 
in the most commonplace fashion conceivable — of 
his former life in Lichfield, and of the folk who had 
lived there then, and to ask questions about their 
descendants, which Kennaston answered as he best 
could. The whole affair was puzzling Kennaston,, 
for he could think of no reason why this frail ancient 
gentleman should have sent for a stranger, even 
though that stranger were the nephew of a dead 
friend, just that they might discuss trivialities. 

So their talking veered, as it seemed, at ran- 
dom. . . . 

“Yes, I was often a guest at Alcluid — a very 
beautiful home it was in those days, famed, as I 
remember, for the many breeds of pigeons which 
your uncle amused himself by maintaining. I sup- 
pose that you also raise white pigeons, my son?” 

Kennaston saw- that the prelate now held a small 
square mirror in his left hand. “No, sir,” Ken- 
naston answered evenly; “there were a great many 
about the place when it came into our possession; 
but we have never gone in very seriously for farm- 
ing.” 

“The pigeon has so many literary associations 


104 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


that I should have thought it would appeal to a man 
of letters/’ the prelate continued. “I ought to have 
said earlier perhaps that I read Men Who Loved 
Alison with great interest and enjoyment. It is a 
notable book. Yet in dealing with the sigil of Sco- 
teia — or so at least it seemed to me — you touched 
upon subjects which had better be left undisturbed. 
There are drugs, my son, which work much good 
in the hands of the skilled physician, but cannot 
without danger be entrusted to the vulgar.” 

He spoke gently; yet it appeared to Kennaston a 
threat was voiced. 

‘‘Sir/’ Kennaston began, “I must tell you that in 
writing of the sigil — as I called it — I designed to 
employ only such general terms as romance ordi- 
narily accords to talismans. All I wrote — I thought 
• — was sheer invention. It is true I found by acci- 
dent a bit of rnetal, from which I derived the idea 
of my so-called sigil’s appearance. That bit of metal 
was to me then just a bit of metal; nor have I any 
notion, even to-day, as to how it came to be lying 
in one of my own garden-paths.” 

He paused. The prelate nodded. “It is always 
interesting to hear whence makers of creative litera- 
ture draw their material,” he stated. 

“Since then, sir, by the drollest of coincidences, 
a famous personage has spoken to me in almost the 


TREATS OF A PRELATE AND OF PIGEONS 105 


identical words you employed this evening, as to 
the sigil of Scoteia. The coincidence, sir, lay less in 
what was said than in the apparently irrelevant allu- 
sion to white pigeons which the personage too made, 
and the little mirror which he too held as he spoke. 
Can you not see, sir/’ Kennaston asked gaily, “to 
what wild imaginings the coincidence tempts a 
weaver of romance? I could find it in my heart to 
believe it the cream of an ironic jest that you great 
ones of the earth have tested me with a password, 
mistakenly supposing that I, also, was initiate. I 
am tempted to imagine some secret understanding, 
some hidden co-operancy, by which you strengthen 
or, possibly, have attained your power. Confess, 
sir, is not the coincidence a droll one?” 

He spoke lightly, but his heart was beating fast. 

“It is remarkable enough,” the prelate conceded, 
smiling. He asked the name of the personage whom 
coincidence linked with him, and being told it, 
chuckled. “I do not think it very odd he carried a 
mirror,” the prelate considered. “He lives before a 
mirror, and behind a megaphone. I confess — mea 
culpa l — I often find my little looking-glass a con- 
venience, in making sure all is right before I go into 
the pulpit. Not a few men in public life, I believe, 
carry such mirrors,” he said, slowly. “But you, I 
take it, have no taste for public life?” 


106 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


“I can assure you — ” Kennaston began. 

‘Think well, my son! Suppose, for one mad 
instant, that your wild imaginings were not wholly 
insane? suppose that you had accidentally stumbled 
upon enough of a certain secret to make it simpler 
to tell you the whole mystery? Cannot a trained 
romancer conceive what you might hope for then?” 

Very still it was in the dark room. . . . 

Kennaston was horribly frightened. “I can as- 
sure you, sir, that even then I would prefer my peace- 
ful lazy life and my dreams. I have not any aptitude 
for action.” 

“Ah, well,” the prelate estimated; “it is scarcely 
a churchman's part to play advocatus mundi. Be- 
lieve me, I would not tempt you from your books. 
And for our dreams, I have always held heretically, 
we are more responsible than for our actions, since 
it is what we are, uninfluenced, that determines our 
dreams.” He seemed to meditate. “I will not tempt 
you, therefore, to tell me the whole truth concerning 
that bit of metal. I suspect, quite candidly, you are 
keeping something back, my son. But you exercise 
a privilege common to all of us.” 

“At least,” said Kennaston, “we will hope my 
poor wits may not be shaken by any more — coin- 
cidences.” 

“I am tolerably certain,” quoth the prelate, with 


TREATS OF A PRELATE AND OF PIGEONS 107 


an indulgent smile, “that there will be no more coin- 
cidences. ” 

Then he gave Kennaston his stately blessing; and 
Kennaston went back to his life of dreams. 


19 - 

Local Laws of N ephelococcygia 


T HERE was no continuity in these dreams save 
that Ettarre was in each of them. A dream 
would usually begin with some lightheaded 
topsyturviness, as when Kennaston found himself 
gazing forlornly down at his remote feet — having 
grown so tall that they were yards away from him 
and he was afraid to stand up — or when thin men 
in black hoods carefully explained the importance 
of the task set him by quoting fragments of the 
multiplication tables, or when a bull who happened 
to be the King of Spain was pursuing him through 
a city of blind people. But presently, as dregs settle 
a little by a little in a glass of water and leave it clear, 
his dream-world would become rational and com- 
pliant with familiar natural laws, and Ettarre would 
be there — desirable above all other contents of the 
universe, and not to be touched under penalty of end- 
ing all. 

Sometimes they would be alone in places which he 
108 


LOCAL LAWS OF NEPHELOCOCCYGIA 109 


did not recognize, sometimes they would be living 
under the Stuarts or the Valois or the Caesars, qi 
other dynasties long since unkingdomed, human lives 
whose obligations and imbroglios affected Horven* 
dile and Ettarre to much that half-serious concern 
with which one follows the action of a romance or a 
well-acted play; for it was perfectly understood 
between Horvendile and Ettarre that they were in- 
volved in the affairs of a dream. 

Ettarre seemed to remember nothing of the hap- 
penings Kennaston had invented in his book. And 
Guiron and Maugis d’Aigremont and Count Em- 
merick and the other people in The Audit at St oris- 
ende — once more to give Men Who Loved Alison 
its original title — were names that rang familiar to 
her somehow, she confessed, but without her know- 
ing why. And so, Kennaston came at last to compre- 
hend that perhaps the Ettarre he loved was not the 
heroine of his book inexplicably vivified ; but, rather, 
that in the book he had, just as inexplicably, drawn a 
blurred portrait of the Ettarre he loved, that ageless 
lovable and loving woman of whom all poets had 
been granted fitful broken glimpses — dimly prefigur- 
ing her advent into his life too, with pallid and feeble 
visionings. But of this he was not ever sure; nor 
did he greatly care, now that he had his dreams. 

There was, be it repeated, no continuity in these 


110 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


Ireamls save that Ettarre was in each of them; that 
alone they had in common: but each dream con- 
formed to certain general laws. For instance, there 
was never any confusion of time — that is, a dream 
extended over precisely the amount of time he ac- 
tually slept, so that each dream-life was limited to 
some eight hours or thereabouts. No dream was 
ever iterated, nor did he ever twice find himself in 
the same surroundings as touched chronology ; thus, 
he was often in Paris and Constantinople and Alex- 
andria and Rome and London, revisiting even the 
exact spot, the very street-corner, which had figured 
in some former dream ; but as terrestrial time went, 
the events of his first dream would either have hap- 
pened years ago or else not be due to happen until 
a great while later. 

He never dreamed of absolutely barbaric or or- 
derless epochs, nor of happenings (so far as he could 
ascertain) elsewhere than in Europe and about the 
Mediterranean coasts; even within these confines 
his dreams were as a rule restricted to urban mat- 
ters, rarely straying beyond city walls : his hypothe- 
sis in explanation of these facts was curious, but 
too fine-spun to be here repeated profitably. 

For a while Kennaston thought these dreams to 
be bits of lives he had lived in previous incarna- 
tions ; later he was inclined to discard this view. He 


LOCAL LAWS OF NEPHELOCOCCYGIA 111 


never to his knowledge lived through precisely the 
same moment in two different capacities and places ; 
but more than once he came within a few years of 
doing this, so that even had he died immediately 
after the earlier-timed dream, it would have been 
impossible for him to have been reborn and reach 
the age he had attained in that dream whose period 
was only a trifle later. In his dreams Kennaston’s 
age varied slightly, but was almost always in pleasant 
proximity to twenty-five. Thus, he was in Jerusa- 
lem on the day of the Crucifixion and was aged about 
twenty-three; yet in another dream he was at Ca- 
preae when Tiberius died there, seven years after- 
ward, and Kennaston was then still in the early 
twenties : and, again, he was in London, at White- 
hall, in 1649, and at Vaux-le^Vicomte near Fon- 
tainebleau in 1661, being on each occasion twenty- 
three or -four. Kennaston could suggest no expla- 
nation of this. 

He often regretted that he was never in any dream 
anybody of historical prominence, so that he could 
have found out what became of him after the dream 
ended. But though he sometimes talked with notable 
persons — inwardly gloating meanwhile over his 
knowledge of what would be the outcome of their 
warfaring or statecraft, and of the manner and even 
the hour of their deaths — he himself seemed fated, 


112 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


as a rule, never to be any one of importance in the 
World’s estimation. Indeed, as Kennaston cheer- 
fully recognized, his was not a temperament likely 
to succeed, as touched material matters, in any im- 
aginable state of society; there was not, and never 
had been, any workaday world in which — as he had 
said at Storisende — he and his like would not, in 
so far as temporal prizes were concerned, appear to 
waste at loose ends and live futilely. Then, more- 
over, in each dream he was woefully hampered by 
inability to recall preceding events in the life he 
was then leading, which handicap doomed him to re- 
doubled inefficiencies. But that did not matter now, 
in view of his prodigal recompenses. . . . 

It was some while before the man made the quaint 
discovery that in these dreams he did not in any way 
resemble Felix Kennaston physically. They were 
astray in an autumn forest, resting beside a small 
fire which he had kindled in the shelter of a boulder, 
when Ettarre chanced to speak of his brown eyes, 
and thereby to perplex him. But there was in this 
dream nothing which would reflect his countenance ; 
and it was later, in Troy Town (Laomedon ruled 
the city then, and Priam they saw as a lad playing at 
marbles in a paved courtyard, where tethered oxen 
watched him over curiously painted mangers) that 
Kennaston looked into a steel mirror, framed with 


LOCAL LAWS OF NEPHELOCOCCYGIA 113 


intertwined ivory serpents that had emeralds for 
eyes, and found there a puzzled stranger. 

Thus it was he discovered that in these dreams 
he was a tall lean youngster, with ruddy cheeks, 
wide-set brown eyes, and a smallish head covered 
with crisp tight-curling dark-red hair; nor did his 
appearance ever change, save only once, in any sub- 
sequent dream. What he saw was so different from 
the pudgy pasty man of forty-odd who, he knew, 
lay at this moment in Felix Kennaston’s bed, breath- 
ing heavily and clasping a bit of metal in his pudgy 
hand, that the stranger in the mirror laughed appre- 
ciatively. 


20 . 

Of Divers Fleshly Riddles 


A LITTLE by a little he was beginning to lose 
interest in that pudgy pasty man of forty- 
odd who was called Felix Kennaston, and 
to handle his affairs more slackly. Once or twice 
Kennaston caught his wife regarding him furtively, 
with a sort of anxious distrust. . . . 

Let there be no mistake here: Felix Kennaston 
had married a woman admirably suited to him, 
and he had never regretted that act. Nor with the 
advent of Ettarre, did he regret it : and never at 
any time would he have considered separating his 
diurnal existence from that of his thin beady-eyed 
capable wife, with graver seriousness than he would 
have accorded, say, to a rambling notion of some 
day being gripped in a trap and having no way to 
escape save by cutting off one of his feet. His af- 
fection for Kathleen was well-founded, proved, and 
understood; but, as it happens, this narrative does 
not chance to deal with that affection. And besides, 
114 


OF DIVERS FLESHLY RIDDLES 


115 


what there was to tell concerning Kennaston’s fond' 
ness for his wife was duly set forth years ago. 

Meanwhile, it began vaguely to be rumored among 
Kennaston’s associates that he drank more than was 
good for him; and toward “drugs” also sped the 
irresponsible arrows of surmise. He himself no- 
ticed, without much interest, that daily he, who had 
once been garrulous, was growing more chary of 
speech; and that his attention was apt to wander 
when the man’s or woman’s face before him spoke 
at any length. These shifting faces talked of wars 
and tariffs and investments and the weather and 
committee-meetings, and of having seen So-and-so 
and of So-and-so’s having said this-or-that, and it 
all seemed of importance to the wearers of these 
faces ; so that he made pretense to listen, patiently. 
What did it matter? 

It did not matter a farthing, he considered, for 
he had cheated life of its main oppression, which 
is loneliness. Now at last Felix Kennaston could 
unconcernedly acknowledge that human beings de- 
velop graveward in continuous solitude. 

His life until this had been in the main normal, 
with its due share of normal intimacies with par- 
ents, kinsmen, friends, a poet’s ordinary allotment 
of sweethearts, and, chief of all, with his wife. No 
one of these people, as he reflected in a commingle- 


116 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


ment of yearning and complacency, had ever com- 
prehended the real Felix Kennaston as he existed, 
in all his hampered strugglings and meannesses, his 
inadequacies and his divine unexercised potentiali- 
ties. 

And he, upon the other hand, knew nothing of these 
people with any certainty. Pettifoggeries were too 
easily practiced in speech or gesture, emotions were 
too often feigned or overcolored in expression, and 
unpopular thoughts were too instinctively dissem- 
bled, as he forlornly knew by his own conduct of 
daily life, for him to put very zealous faith in any 
information gained through his slender fallible five 
senses ; and it was the cream of the jest that through 
these five senses lay his only means of getting any 
information whatever. 

All that happened to him, he considered, happened 
inside his skull. Nothing which happened in the big 
universe affected him in the least except as it roused 
certain forces lodged in his skull. His life consisted 
of one chemical change after another, haphazardly 
provoked in some three pounds of fibrous matter 
tucked inside his skull. And so, people’s heads took 
on a new interest ; how was one to guess what was 
going on in those queer round boxes, inset with eyes, 
as people so glibly called certain restive and glinting 
things that moved in partial independence of their 


OF DIVERS FLESHLY RIDDLES 


117 


setting, and seemed to have an individual vitality — 
in those queer round boxes out of which an uncanny 
vegetation, that people, here again, so glibly and 
unwonderingly called hair, was sprouting as if from 
the soil of a planet? 

Perhaps — he mused — perhaps in reality all heads 
were like isolated planets, with impassable space 
between each and its nearest neighbor. You read 
in the newspapers every once in a while that, be- 
cause of one-or-another inexplicable phenomenon, 
Mars was supposed to be attempting to communicate 
with the earth; and perhaps it was in just such 
blurred and unsatisfactory fashion that what hap- 
pened in one human head was signaled to another, 
on those rare occasions when the signal was des- 
patched in entire good faith. Yes, a perpetual isola- 
tion, for all the fretful and vain strivings of hu- 
manity against such loneliness, was probably a per- 
durable law in all other men’s lives, precisely as it 
had been in his own life until the coming of Ettarre. 


21 . 

In Pursuit of a Whisper 


N IGHTLY he went adventuring with Ettarre : 
and they saw the cities and manners of many 
men, to an extent undreamed-of by Ithaca's 
mundivagant king ; and among them even those three 
persons who had most potently influenced human 
life. 

For once, in an elongated room with buff-colored 
walls — having scarlet hangings over its windows, 
and seeming larger than it was in reality, because of 
its many mirrors — they foregathered with Napoleon, 
on the evening of his coronation: the emperor of 
half-Europe was fretting over an awkward hitch in 
the day’s ceremony, caused by his sisters’ attempt 
to avoid carrying the Empress Josephine’s train; and 
he was grumbling because the old French families 
continued to ignore him, as a parvenu. In a neg- 
lected orchard, sunsteeped and made drowsy by the 
murmur of bees, they talked with Shakespeare ; the 
118 


IN PURSUIT OF A WHISPER 


119 


playwright, his nerves the worse for the preceding 
night’s potations, was peevishly complaining of the 
meager success of his later comedies, worrying over 
Lord Pembroke’s neglect of him, and trying to con- 
coct a masque in the style of fat Ben Jonson, since 
that was evidently what the theater-patronizing pub- 
lic wanted. And they were with Pontius Pilate in 
Jerusalem, on the evening of a day when the sky 
had been black and the earth had trembled; and 
Pilate, benevolent and replete with supper, was ex- 
plaining the latest theories concerning eclipses and 
earthquakes to his little boy, and chuckling with 
fond pride in the youngster’s intelligent questions. 

These three were a few among the prominent 
worthies of remoter days whom Kennaston was en- 
abled to view as they appeared in the flesh ; but, as a 
rule, chance thrust him into the company of medi- 
ocre people living ordinary lives amid surroundings 
which seemed outlandish to him, but to them a mat- 
ter of course. And everywhere, in every age, it 
seemed to him, men stumbled amiable and shatter- 
pated through a jungle of miracles, blind to its won- 
derfulness, and intent to gain a little money, food 
and sleep, a trinket or two, some rare snatched fleet- 
ing moments of rantipole laughter, and at the last 
a decent bed to die in. He, and he only, it seemed 
to Felix Kennaston, could see the jungle and all its 


120 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


awe-inspiring beauty, wherethrough men scurried 
like feeble-minded ants. 

He often wondered whether any other man had 
been so licensed as himself ; and prowling, as he 
presently did, in odd byways of printed matter — 
for he found the library of his predecessor at Al- 
cluid a mine rich-veined with strangeness — Kennas- 
ton lighted on much that appeared to him significant. 
Even such apparently unrelated matters as the doc- 
trine of metempsychosis, all the grotesque literature 
of witches, sorcerers and familiar spirits, and of 
muses who actually prompted artistic composition 
with audible voices, were beginning to fall into 
cloudily-discerned interlocking. Kennaston read 
much nowadays in his dead uncle’s books; and he 
often wished that, even at the expense of Felix Ken- 
naston’s being reduced again to poverty, it were pos- 
sible to revivify the man who had amassed and read 
these books. Kennaston wanted to talk with him. 

Meanwhile, Kennaston read of Endymion and 
Numa, of Iason and Anchises, of Tannhauser, and 
Foulques Plantagenet, and Raymondin de la Foret, 
and Olger Danske, and other mortal men to whom 
old legend- weavers, as if wistfully, accredited the 
love of immortal mistresses — and of less fortunate 
nympholepts, frail babbling planet-stricken folk, who 
had spied by accident upon an inhuman loveliness, 


IN PURSUIT OF A WHISPER 


121 


and so, must pine away consumed by foiled desire of 
a beauty which the homes and cities and the tilled 
places of men did not afford, and life did not bring 
forth sufficingly. He read Talmudic tales of Sulie- 
man-ben-Daoud — even in name transfigured out of 
any resemblance to an amasser of reliable axioms — 
that proud luxurious despot “who went daily to the 
comeliest of the spirits for wisdom”; and of Arthur 
and the Lady Nimue; and of Thomas of Ercildoune, 
whom the Queen of Faery drew from the mer- 
chants’ market-place with ambiguous kindnesses; 
and of John Faustus, who “through fantasies and 
deep cogitations” was enabled to woo successfully a 
woman that died long before his birth, and so won 
to his love, as the book recorded, “this stately pearl of 
Greece, fair Helena, the wife to King Menelaus.” 

And, as has been said, the old idea of muses who 
actually prompted artistic composition, with audible 
voices, took on another aspect. He came to suspect 
that other creative writers had shared such a divided 
life as his was now, for of this he seemed to find 
traces here and there. Coleridge offered at once an 
arresting parallel. Yes, Kennaston reflected; and 
Coleridge had no doubt spoken out in the first glow 
of wonder, astounded into a sort of treason, when 
he revealed how he wrote Kubla Khan; so that thus 
perhaps Coleridge had told far more concerning the 


122 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


origin of this particular poem than he ever did as to 
his later compositions. Then, also, I have a volume 
of Herrick from Kennaston’s library with curious 
comments penciled therein, relative to Lovers How 
They Come and Part and His Mistress Calling Him 
to Elysium; a copy of Marlowe’s Tragical History 
of Doctor Faustus is similarly annotated ; and on a 
fly-leaf in Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, apropos 
of passages in the first chapter of the ninth book, 
Kennaston has inscribed strange speculations very 
ill suited to general reading. All that Kennaston 
cared to print, however, concerning the hypothesis 
he eventually evolved, you can find in The Tinctured 
Veil, where he has nicely refrained from too-explicit 
writing, and — of course — does not anywhere point- 
blank refer to his personal experiences. 

Then Kennaston ran afoul of the Rosicrucians, 
and their quaint dogmas, which appeared so pre- 
posterous at first, took on vital meanings pres- 
ently; and here too he seemed to surprise the cau- 
tious whispering of men who neither cared nor dared 
to speak with candor of all they knew. It seemed 
to him he understood that whispering which was 
everywhere apparent in human history; for he too 
was initiate. 

He wondered very often about his uncle. . . . 


22 . 

Of Truisms: Treated Reasonably 


H E seemed, indeed, to find food for wonder 
everywhere. It was as if he had awakened 
from a dragging nightmare of life made up 
of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, 
to see life as it really was, and to rejoice in its ex- 
quisite wonderfulness. 

How poignantly strange it was that life could 
afford him nothing save consciousness of the moment 
immediately at hand! Memory and anticipation, 
whatever else they might do — and they had im- 
portant uses, of course, in rousing emotion — yet did 
not deal directly with reality. What you regretted, 
or were proud of, having done yesterday was no 
more real now than the deeds of Caesar Borgia or 
St. Paul; and what you looked forward to within 
the half-hour was as non-existent as the senility of 
your unborn great-grandchildren. Never was man 
brought into contact with reality save through the 
evanescent emotions and sensations of that single 
123 


124 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


moment, that infinitesimal fraction of a second, 
which was passing now. This commonplace, so sim- 
ple and so old, bewildered Kennaston when he came 
unreservedly to recognize its truth. . . . 

To live was to be through his senses conscious, 
one by one, of a restricted number of these fractions 
of a second. Success in life, then, had nothing to 
do with bank-accounts or public office, or any step 
toward increasing the length of one’s obituary no- 
tices, but meant to be engrossed utterly by as many 
as possible of these instants. And complete success 
required a finding, in these absorbing instants, of 
employment for every faculty he possessed. It was 
for this that Kennaston had always vaguely longed ; 
and to this, if only in dreams, he now attained. 

If only in dreams! he debated: why, and was he 
not conscious, now, in his dreams, of every moment 
as it fled ? And corporal life in banks and ballrooms 
and legislative halls and palaces, nowhere had any- 
thing more than that to offer mortal men. 

It is not necessary to defend his course of reason- 
ing; to the contrary, its fallacy is no less apparent 
than its conduciveness to unbusinesslike conclusions. 
But it is highly necessary to tell you that, according 
to Felix Kennaston’s account, now, turn by turn, he 
was in Horvendile’s person rapt by nearly every pas- 
sion, every emotion, the human race has ever known. 


TRUISMS : TREATED REASONABLY 


125 


True, throughout these dramas into which chance 
plunged him, in that he knew always he was dream- 
ing, he was at once performer and spectator ; but he 
played with the born actor’s zest — feeling his part, 
as people say — and permitting the passion he por- 
trayed to possess him almost completely. 

Almost completely, be it repeated; for there was 
invariably a sufficient sense of knowing he was only 
dreaming to prevent entire abandonment to the raw 
emotion. Kennaston preferred it thus. He pre- 
ferred in this more comely way to play with human 
passions, rather than, as seemed the vulgar use, to 
consent to become their battered plaything. 

It pleased him, too, to be able to have done with 
such sensations and emotions as did not interest him ; 
for he had merely to touch Ettarre, and the dream 
ended. In this fashion he would very often termi- 
nate an existence which was becoming distasteful — 
resorting debonairly to this sort of suicide, and thus 
dismissing an era’s social orderings and its great 
people as toys that, played with, had failed to amuse 
Felix Kennaston. 



BOOK FOURTH 


“But there were dreams to sell 
III didst thou buy: 

Life is a dream, they tell. 
Waking to die . 

Dreaming a dream to prize. 

Is wishing ghosts to rise ; 

And, if I had the spell 
To call the buried — well, 
Which one would I?” 



23 - 

Economic Considerations of Piety 


A S has been said, Kennaston read much curious 
matter in his dead uncle’s library. . . . 

But most books — even Felix Kennaston’s 
own little books — did not seem now to be affairs of 
heavy moment. Once abed, clasping his gleaming 
broken bit of metal, and the truthful history of all 
that had ever happened was, instead, Kennaston’s 
library. It was not his to choose from what volume 
or on which page thereof he would read; accident, 
as it seemed, decided that; but the chance-opened 
page lay unblurred before him, and he saw it with a 
clarity denied to other men of his generation. 

Kennaston stood by the couch of Tiberius Caesar 
as he lay ill at Capreae. Beside him hung a memo- 
rable painting, by Parrhasius, which represented the 
virgin Atalanta in the act of according very curious 
assuagements to her lover’s ardor. Charicles, a 
Greek physiciaft, was telling the Emperor of a new 
129 


130 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


religious sect that had arisen in Judea, and of the 
persecutions these disciples of Christus were endur- 
ing. Old Caesar listened, made grave clucking noises 
of disapproval. 

“It is, instead, a religion that should be fostered. 
The man preached peace. It is what my father be- 
fore me strove for, what I have striven for, what my 
successors must strive for. Peace alone may pre- 
serve Rome : the empire is too large, a bubble blown 
so big and tenuous that the first shock will disrupt 
it in suds. Pilate did well to crucify the man, else 
we could not have made a God of him ; but the per- 
secution of these followers of Christus must cease. 
This Nazarene preached the same doctrine that I 
have always preached. I shall build him a temple. 
The rumors concerning him lack novelty, it is true : 
this God born of a mortal woman is the old legend of 
Dionysos and Mithra and Hercules, a little pulled 
about; Gautama also was tempted in a wilderness; 
Prometheus served long ago as man’s scapegoat 
under divine anger; and the cult of Pollux and 
Castor, and of Adonis, has made these resurrection 
stories hackneyed. In fine, Charicles, you have 
brought me a woefully inartistic jumble of old tales; 
but the populace prefers old tales, they delight to be 
told what they have heard already. I shall certainly 
build Christus a temple.” 


ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS OF PIETY 131 


So he ran on, devising the reception of Christ 
into the Roman pantheon, as a minor deity at first, 
and thence, if the receipts at his temple justified it, 
to be raised to greater eminence. Tiberius saw large 
possibilities in the worship of this new God, both 
from a doctrinal and a money-making standpoint. 
Then Caesar yawned, and ordered that a company 
of his Spintriae be summoned to his chamber, to 
amuse him with their unnatural diversions. 

But Charicles had listened in horror, for he was 
secretly a Christian, and knew that the blood of the 
martyrs is the seed of the church. He foresaw that, 
without salutary discouragement, the worship of 
Christus would never amount to more than the social 
fad of a particular season, just as that of Cybele 
and that of Ela-Gabal had been modish in differ^ 
ent years; and would afterward dwindle, precisely as 
these cults had done, into shrugged-at old-fashioned- 
ness. Then-, was it not written that they only were 
assuredly blessed who were persecuted for righteous- 
ness’ sake? — Why, martyrdom was the one certain 
road to Heaven; and a religion which is patronized 
by potentates, obviously, breeds no martyrs. 

So Charicles mingled poison in Caesar’s drink, that 
Caesar might die, and crazed Caligula succeed him, 
to put all Christians to the sword. And Charicles 
young Caius Caesar Caligula — Child of the Camp, 


132 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


Father of Armies, Beloved of the Gods — killed first 
of all. 

Then a lean man, white-robed, and clean-shaven 
as to his head, was arranging a complicated toy. He 
labored in a gray-walled room, lit only by one large 
circular window opening upon the sea. There was 
an alcove in this room, and in the alcove stood a 
large painted statue. 

This prefigured a crowned woman, in bright parti- 
colored garments of white and red and yellow, under 
a black mantle embroidered with small sparkling 
stars. Upon the woman’s forehead was a disk, like 
a round glittering mirror; seen closer, it was en- 
graved with tiny characters, and Kennaston viewed 
it with a thrill of recognition. To the woman’s 
right were vipers rising from the earth, and to the 
left were stalks of ripe corn, all in their proper 
colors. In one hand she carried a golden boat, from 
which a coiled asp raised its head threateningly. 
From the other hand dangled a cluster of slender 
metal rods, which wxre not a part of the statue, but 
were loosely attached to it, so that the least wind 
caused them to move and jangle. There was nothing 
whatever in the gray- walled room save this curious 
gleaming statue and the lean man and the mechani- 
cal toy on which he labored. 


ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS T)F PIETY 133 


He explained its workings, willingly enough. See 
now ! you kindled a fire in this little cube-shaped box. 
The, air inside expanded through this pipe into the 
first jar of water, and forced the water out, through 
this other pipe, into this tiny bucket. The bucket 
thus became heavier and heavier, till its weight at 
last pulled down the string by which the bucket was 
swung over a pulley, and so, moved this lever. 

Oh, yes, the notion was an old one; the priest 
admitted he had copied the toy from one made by 
Heron of Alexandria, who died years ago. Still, it 
was an ingenious trifle: moreover — and here was 
the point — enlarge the scale, change the cube-shaped 
box into the temple altar, fasten the lever to the 
temple doors, and you had the mechanism for a 
miracle. People had only to offer burnt sacrifices 
to the Goddess, and before their eyes the All- 
Mother, the holy and perpetual preserver of the 
human race, would stoop to material thaumaturgy, 
and would condescend to animate her sacred por- 
tals. 

“We very decidedly need' some striking miracle 
to advertise our temple,” he told Kennaston. “Folk 
are flocking like sheep after these barbarous new 
Galilean heresies. But the All-Mother is compas- 
sionate to human frailty; and this device will win 
back many erring feet to the true way.” 


134 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


And Kennaston saw there were tears in this man’s 
dark sad- eyes. The trickster was striving to uphold 
the faith of his fathers; and in the attempt he had 
constructed a practicable steam-engine. 


24 . 

Deals with Pen Scratches 


T HEN Kennaston was in Alexandria when 
John the Grammarian pleaded with the vic- 
torious Arabian general Amrou to spare the 
royal library, the sole repository at this period of 
many of the masterworks of Greek and Roman 
literature. 

But Amrou only laughed, with a practical man’s 
contempt for such matters. “The Koran contains 
all that is necessary to salvation : if these books teach 
as the Koran teaches they are superfluous; if they 
contain anything contrary to the Koran they ought 
to be destroyed. Let them be used as fuel for the 
public baths.” 

And this was done. Curious, very curious, it was 
to Kennaston, to witness this utilitarian employment 
of a nation’s literature ; and it moved him strangely. 
He had come at this season to believe that individual 
acts can count for nothing, in the outcome of things. 
Whatever might happen upon earth, during the ex- 
135 


136 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


istence of that midge among the planets, affected in- 
finitesimally, if at all, the universe of which earth 
was a part so inconceivably tiny. To figure out the 
importance in this universe of the deeds of one or 
another nation temporarily clustering on earth’s 
surface, when you considered that neither the doings 
of Assyria or of Rome, or of any kingdom, had 
ever extended a thousand feet from earth’s surface, 
was a task too delicate for human reason. For 
human faculties to attempt to estimate the indi- 
viduals of this nation, in the light of the relative 
importance of their physical antics while living, was 
purely and simply ridiculous. To assume, as did so 
many well-meaning persons, that Omniscience de- 
voted eternity to puzzling out just these minutiae, 
seemed at the mildest to postulate in Omniscience a 
queer mania for trivialities. With the passage of 
time, whatever a man had done, whether for good 
or evil, with the man’s bodily organs, left the 
man’s parish unaffected: only man’s thoughts and 
dreams could outlive him, in any serious sense, and 
these might survive with perhaps augmenting in- 
fluence : so that Kennaston had come to think artistic 
creation in words — since marble and canvas inevit- 
ably perished — was the one, possibly, worth-while em- 
ployment of human life. But here was a crude cor- 
poral deed which bluntly destroyed thoughts, and 


DEALS WITH PEN SCRATCHES 


W 


annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Kennaston 
this seemed the one real tragedy that could be 
staged on earth. . 

Curious, very curious, it was to Kennaston, to see 
the burning of sixty-three plays written by 
/Eschylus, of a hundred and six by Sophocles, and 
of fifty-five by Euripides — master works eternally 
lost, which, as Kennaston knew, the world would 
affect to deplore eternally, whatever might be the 
world’s real opinion in the matter. 

But of these verbal artificers something at least 
was to endure. They would fare better than Aga- 
thon and Ion and Achaeus, their admitted equals in 
splendor, whose whole life-work was passing, at the 
feet of Horvendile, into complete oblivion. There, 
too, were perishing all the writings of the Pleiad — 
the noble tragedies of Homerus, and Sositheus, and 
Lycophron, and Alexander, and Philiscus, and Sosi- 
phanes, and Dionysides. All the great comic poets, 
too, were burned pellmell with these — Telecleides, 
Hermippus, Eupolis, Antiphanes, Ameipsas, Lysip- 
pus, and Menander — “whom nature mimicked,” as 
the phrase was. And here, posting to obliteration, 
went likewise Thespis, and Pratinas, and Phrynichus 
— and Choerilus, whom cultured persons had long 
ranked with Homer. Nothing was to remain of 
any of these save the bare name, and even this 


138 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


would be known only to pedants. All these, spurred 
by the poet’s ageless monomania, had toiled toward, 
and had attained, the poet’s ageless goal — to write 
perfectly of beautiful happenings: and of this 
action’s normal by-product, which is immortality 
in the mouths and minds of succeeding generations, 
all these were being robbed, by the circumstance that 
parchment is inflammable. 

Here was beauty, and wit, and learning, and 
genius, being wasted — quite wantonly — never to be 
recaptured, never to be equaled again (despite the 
innumerable painstaking penmen destined to fret the 
hearts of unborn wives), and never, in the outcome, 
to be thought of as a very serious loss to anybody, 
after all. . . . 

These book-rolls burned with great rapidity, crack- 
ling cheerily as the garnered wisdom of Cato’s oc- 
togenarian life dissolved in puffs of smoke, and the 
wit of Sosipater blazed for the last time in heating 
a pint of water. . . . But then in Parma long after- 
ward Kennaston observed a monk erasing a song of 
Sappho’s from a parchment on which the monk 
meant to inscribe a feeble little Latin hymn of his 
own composition; in an obscure village near Alex- 
andria Kennaston saw the only existent copy of the 
Mimes of Herondas crumpled up and used as pack- 
ing for a mummy-case ; in the tidiest of old English 


DEALS WITH PEN SCRATCHES 


139 


kitchens Kennaston watched thrifty Betty Baker, 
then acting as cook for Warburton the antiquary, 
destroy in making pie-crust the unique manuscript 
copies of some fifty plays, among which were never- 
printed tragedies by Marlowe and Cyril Tourneur 
and George Chapman, and comedies by Middleton 
and Greene and Dekker, and — rather drolly — those 
very three dramas which Shakespeare, when he 
talked with Horvendile in the orchard, had asserted 
to perpetuate, upon the whole, the most excellent 
fruit of Shakespeare’s ripened craftsmanship. 

Yet — conceding Heaven to be an actual place, 
and attainment of its felicities to be the object of 
human life — Kennaston could not, after all, de- 
tect any fault in Amrou’s logic. Esthetic consider- 
ations could, in that event, but lead to profitless 
time-wasting where every moment was precious. 


2 5 - 

By-Products of Rational Endeavor 


T HEN again Kennaston stood in a stone- 
walled apartment, like a cell, wherein there 
was a furnace and much wreckage. A con- 
templative friar was regarding the disorder about 
him with disapproval, the while he sucked at two 
hurt fingers. 

“There can be no doubt that Old Legion conspires 
to hinder the great work,” he considered. 

“And what is the great work, father?” Kennaston 
asked him. 

“To find the secret of eternal life, my son. What 
else is lacking? Man approaches to God in all things 
save this, Imaginis imago ■, created after God’s image. 
But as yet, by reason of his mortality, man shudders 
in a world that is arrayed against him. Thus, the 
heavens threaten with winds and lightnings, with 
plague-breeding meteors and the unfriendly aspect 
of planets ; the big seas molest with waves and inun- 
dations, stealthily drowning cities overnight, and 
140 


BY-PRODUCTS OF RATIONAL ENDEAVOR 141 


sucking down tall navies as a child gulps sugarplums ; 
whereas how many plants and gums and seeds bear 
man’s destruction in their tiny hearts ! what soulless 
beasts of the field and of the wood are everywhere 
enleagued in endless feud against him, with tusks 
and teeth, with nails and claws and venomous stings, 
made sharp for man’s demolishment ! Thus all 
struggle miserably, like hunted persons under a 
sentence of death that may at best be avoided for a 
little while. And manifestly, this is not as it should 
be.” 

“Yet I much fear it is so ordered, father.” 

The old man said testily: “I repeat, for your bet- 
ter comfort, there can be no doubt that Satan alone 
conspires to hinder the great work. No; it would 
be abuse of superstition to conceive, as would be 
possible for folk of slender courage, that the finger 
of heaven has to-day unloosed this destruction, to 
my bodily hurt and spiritual admonition.” Kennas- 
ton could see, though, that the speaker half believed 
this might be exactly what had happened. “For I 
am about no vaunting transgression of man’s estate ; 
I do but seek to recover his lost heritage. You will 
say to me, it is written that never shall any man be 
one day old in the sight of God? — Yet it is like- 
wise written that unto God a thousand years are but 
one day. For one thousand years, then, may each 


142 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


man righteously hope to have death delay to enact 
the midwife to his second birth. It advantages not 
to contend that even in the heyday of patriarchs few 
approached to such longevity ; for Moses, relinquish- 
ing to silence all save the progeny of Seth, nowhere 
directly tells us that some of the seed of Cain did 
not outlive Methuselah. Yea, and our common par- 
ent, Adam, was created in the perfect age of man, 
which then fell not short of one hundred years, since 
at less antiquity did none of the antediluvian fathers 
beget issue, as did Adam in the same year breath was 
given him; and the years of Adam’s life were nine 
hundred and thirty; whereby it is a reasonable con- 
ceit of learned persons to compute him to have ex- 
ceeded a thousand years in age, if not in duration of 
existence. Now, it is written that we shall all die as 
Adam died ; and caution should not scruple to affirm 
this is an excellent dark saying, prophetic of that day 
when no man need outdo Adam in celerity to put by 
his flesh.” 

Then Kennaston found the alchemist had been 
compounding nitrum of Memphis with sulphur, mix- 
ing in a little willow charcoal to make the whole 
more friable, and that the powder had exploded. 
The old man was now interested, less in the break- 
age, than in the horrible noise this accident had oc- 
casioned. 


BY-PRODUCTS OF RATIONAL ENDEAVOR 143 


“The mixture might be used in court-pageants and 
miracle-plays,” he estimated, “to indicate the en- 
trance of Satan, or the fall of Sodom, or Herod’s 
descent into the Pit, and so on. Yes, I shall thriftily 
sell this secret, and so get money to go on with the 
great work.” 

Seeking to find the means of making life per- 
petual, he had accidentally discovered gunpowder. 

Then at Valladolid an age-stricken seaman, 
wracked with gout, tossed in a mean bed and 
| grumbled to bare walls. He, “the Admiral,” 
j. was neglected by King Philip, the broth was unfit 
; for a dog’s supper, his son Diego was a laggard fool. 
Thus the old fellow mumbled. 

Ingratitude everywhere! and had not he, “the 
i Admiral” — “the Admiral of Mosquito Land,” as 
! damnable street-songs miscalled him, he whimpered, 
in a petulant gust of self-pity — had not he found out 
at last a way by sea to the provinces of the Great 
Khan and the treasures of Cipango? Give him an- 
other fleet, and he would demonstrate what malig- 
nant fools were his enemies. He would convert the 
Khan from Greek heresies ; or else let the Holy In- 
quisition be established in Cipango, the thumbscrew 
and the stake be fittingly utilized there ad majorem 
Dei gloriam — all should redound to the credit of 


144 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


King Philip, both temporal and celestial. And what 
wealth, too, a capable emissary would bring back to 
his Majesty — what cargoes of raw silks, of gold and 
precious gems, ravished from Kanbalu and Taidu, 
those famed marvelous cities! . . . But there was 
only ingratitude and folly everywhere, and the broth 
was cold. . . . 

Thus mumbled the broken adventurer, Cristoforo 
Colombo. He had doubled the world’s size and 
resources, in his attempts to find some defenseless 
nation which could be plundered with impunity ; and 
he was dying in ignorance of what his endeavors had 
achieved. 

And Kennaston was at Blickling Hall when King 
Henry read the Pope’s letter which threatened ex- 
communication. “Nan, Nan,” the King said, “this 
is a sorry business.” 

“Sire,” says Mistress Boleyn, saucily, “and am I 
not worth a little abuse?” 

“You deserve some quite certainly,” he agrees; 
and his bright lecherous pig’s eyes twinkled, and he 
guffawed. 

“Defy the Pope, then, sire, and marry your true 
love. Let us snap fingers at Giulio de Medici — ” 

“Faith, and not every lass can bring eleven fingers 
to the task,” the King put in. 


BY-PRODUCTS OF RATIONAL ENDEAVOR 145 


She tweaked his fine gold beard, and Kennas- 
ton saw that upon her left hand there was really 
an extra finger. 

“My own sweetheart,” says she, “if you would 
have my person as much at your disposal as my 
heart is, we must part company with Rome. Then, 
too, at the cost of a few Latin phrases, some foolish 
candle-snuffing and a little bell-ringing, you may take 
for your own all the fat abbey-lands in these islands, 
and sell them for a great deal of money,” she pointed 
out. 

So, between lust and greed, the King was per- 
suaded. In the upshot, “because” — as was duly 
set forth to his lieges — “a virtuous monarch ought 
to surround his throne with many peers of the 
worthiest of both sexes,” Mistress Anne Boleyn was 
created Marchioness of Pembroke, in her own right, 
with a reversion of the title and estates to her off- 
spring, whether such might happen to be legitimate 
or not. A pension of £1,000 per annum, with gold, 
silver and parcel-gilt plate to the value of £1,188, 
was likewise awarded her : and the King, by thus 
piously defying Romish error, earned the abbey- 
lands, as well as the key of a certain bed-chamber, 
and the eternal approbation of zealous Protestants, 
for thus inaugurating religious liberty. 


26 . 


“Epper Si Muove” 



T HESE ironies Kennaston witnessed among 
many others, as he read in this or that chance- 
opened page from the past. Everywhere, it 
seemed to him, men had labored blindly, at flat odds 
with rationality, and had achieved everything of note 
by accident. Everywhere he saw reason to echo the 
cry of Maugis d’Aigremont — “It is very strange 
how affairs fall out in this world of ours, so that 
a man may discern no plan or purpose anywhere.” 

Here was the astounding fact: the race did go 
forward ; the race did achieve ; and in every way the 
race grew better. Progress through irrational and 
astounding blunders, whose outrageousness be- 
d war fed the wildest cliches of romance, was what 
Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also 
was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende 
had been, in his puny romance ; and the puppets, here 
too, moved as they thought of their own volition, but 
146 


‘EPPER SI MUOVE’ 


147 


really in order to serve a denouement in which many 
of them had not any personal part or interest. . . . 

And always the puppets moved toward greater 
efficiency and comeliness. The puppet-shifter ap- 
peared to seek at once utility and artistic self-expres- 
sion. So the protoplasm — that first imperceptible 
pinhead of living matter — had become a fish; the 
fish had become a batrachian, the batrachian a reptile, 
the reptile a mammal; thus had the puppets con- 
tinuously been reshaped, into more elaborate forms 
more captivating to the eye, until amiable and shat- 
ter-pated man stood erect in the world. And man, in 
turn, had climbed a long way from gorillaship, how- 
ever far he was as yet from godhead — blindly mov- 
ing always, like fish and reptile, toward unappre- 
hended loftier goals. 

But, just as men’s lives came to seem to Kennas- 
ton like many infinitesimal threads woven into the 
pattern of human destiny, so Kennaston grew to 
suspect that the existence of mankind upon earth 
was but an incident in the unending struggle of life 
to find a home in the universe. Human inhabitancy 
was not even a very important phase in the world’s 
history, perhaps; a scant score or so of centuries 
ago there had been no life on earth, and by and by 
the planet would be a silent naked frozen clod. 
Would this sphere then have served its real purpose 


148 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


of being, by having afforded foothold to life for a 
few aeons? 

He could not tell. But Kennaston contemplated 
sidereal space full of such frozen worlds, where life 
seemed to have flourished for a while and to have 
been dispossessed — and full, too, of glowing suns, 
with their huge satellites, all slowly cooling and 
congealing into fitness for life’s occupancy. Life 
would tarry there also, he reflected ; and thence also 
life would be evicted. For life was not a part of the 
universe, not a product of the universe at all per- 
haps, but, rather, an intruder into the cosmic machin- 
ery, which moved without any consideration of life’s 
needs. Like a bird striving to nest in a limitless 
engine, insanely building among moving wheels and 
cogs and pistons and pulley-bands, whose moving 
toward their proper and intended purposes inevitably 
swept away each nest before completion — so it 
might be that life passed from moving world to 
world, found transitory foothold, began to build, 
and was driven out. 

What was it that life sought to rear? — what was 
the purpose of this endless endeavor, of which the 
hatching of an ant or the begetting of an emperor 
was equally a by-product? and of which the existence 
of Felix Kennaston was a manifestation past con- 
ceiving in its unimportance? Toward what did life 


“EPPER SI MUOVE’ 


149 


aspire? — that force which moved in Felix Kennas- 
ton, and thus made Felix Kennaston also an intruder, 
a temporary visitor, in the big moving soulless 
mechanism of earth and water and planets and suns 
and interlocking solar systems? 

“To answer that question must be my modest 
attempt,” he decided. “In fine — why is a Kennas- 
ton? The query has a humorous ring undoubtedly, 
in so far as it is no little suggestive of the spinning 
mouse that is the higher the fewer — but, after all, 
it voices the sole question in which I personally am 
interested. . . 

“Why is a Kennaston?” he asked himself — thus 
whimsically voicing a real desire to know if hu- 
man beings were intended for any especial purpose. 
Most of us find it more comfortable, upon the whole, 
to stave off such queries — with a jest, a shrug, or a 
Scriptural quotation, as best suits personal taste; but 
Kennaston was “queer” enough to face the situation 
quite gravely. Here was he, the individual, very 
possibly placed on — at all events, infesting — a par- 
ticular planet for a considerable number of years ; the 
planet was so elaborately constructed, so richly 
clothed with trees and valleys and uplands and run- 
ning waters and multitudinary grass-blades, and the 
body that housed Felix Kennaston was so intricately 


150 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


wrought with tiny bones and veins and sinews, with 
sockets and valves and levers, and little hairs which 
grew upon the body like grass-blades about the earth, 
that it seemed unreasonable to suppose this much 
cunning mechanism had been set agoing aimlessly: 
and so, he often wondered if he was not perhaps 
expected to devote these years of human living to 
some intelligible purpose? 

Religion, of course, assured him that the an- 
swer to his query was, in various books, explicitly 
written, in very dissimilar forms. But Kennaston 
could find little to attract him in any theory of the 
universe based upon direct revelations from heaven. 
Conceding that divinity had actually stated so-and- 
so, from Sinai or Delphi or Mecca, and had been 
reported without miscomprehension or error, there 
was no particular reason for presuming that divinity 
had spoken veraciously: and, indeed, all available 
analogues went to show that nothing in nature dealt 
with its inferiors candidly. To liken the relation- 
ship to the intercourse of a father with his children, 
as did all revealed religions with queer uniformity, 
was at best a two-edged simile, in that it suggested a 
possible amiability of intention combined with in- 
evitable duplicity. The range of an earthly father’s 
habitual deceptions, embracing the source of life and 
Christmas presents on one side and his own fallibility 


‘EPPER SI MUOVE’ 


151 


on the other, was wide enough to make the com- 
parison suspicious. When fathers were at their 
worst they punished ; and when in their kindliest and 
most expansive moods, why, then it was — precisely 
— that they told their children fairy-stories. It 
seemed to Kennaston, for a while, that all religions 
ended in this blind-alley. 

To exercise for an allotted period divinely-recom- 
mended qualities known as virtues, and to be re- 
warded therefor, by an immortal score-keeper, ap- 
peared a rather childish performance all around. 
Yet every religion agreed in asserting that such was 
the course of human life at its noblest; and to 
believe matters were thus arranged indisputably 
satisfied an innate craving of men’s natures, as 
Kennaston was, perhaps uniquely, privileged to see 
for himself. 

Under all theocracies the run of men proved 
much the same : as has been said, it was for the most 
part with quite ordinary people that Horvendile 
dealt in dreams. The Roman citizenry, for instance, 
he found did not devote existence, either under the 
Republic or the Empire, to shouting in unanimous 
response to metrical declamations, and worrying over 
their own bare legs, or in other ways conform to 
the best traditions of literature and the stage ; nor did 
the Athenians corroborate their dramatists by talking 


152 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


perpetually of the might of Zeus or Aphrodite, any 
more than motormen and stockbrokers conversed 
continually of the Holy Ghost. Substantial people 
everywhere worshiped at their accustomed temple at 
accustomed intervals, and then put the matter out 
of mind, in precisely the fashion of any reputable 
twentieth-century church-goer. Meanwhile they had 
their business-affairs, their sober chats on weather 
probabilities, their staid diversions (which every- 
where bored them frightfully), their family jokes, 
their best and second-best clothes, their flirtations, 
their petty snobbishnesses, and their perfectly irra- 
tional faith in Omnipotence and in the general kind- 
liness of Omnipotence — all these they had, and made 
play with, to round out living. Ritualistic worship 
everywhere seemed to be of the nature of a con- 
scious outing, of a conscious departure from every- 
day life; it was generally felt that well-balanced peo- 
ple would not permit such jaunts to interfere with 
their business-matters or home-ties; but there was 
no doubt men did not like to live without religion and 
religion’s promise of a less trivial and more ordered 
and symmetrical existence — to-morrow. 

Meanwhile, men were to worry, somehow, 
through to-day — doing as infrequent evil as they 
conveniently could, exercising as much bravery and 
honesty and benevolence as they happened to possess, 


‘EPPER SI MUOVE’ 


153 


through a life made up of unimportant tasks and 
tedious useless little habits. Men felt the routine to 
be niggardly: but to-morrow — as their priests and 
bonzes, their flamens and imauns, their medicine men 
and popes and rectors, were unanimous — would be 
quite different. 

To-day alone was real. Never was man brought 
into contact with reality save through the evanescent 
emotions and sensations of that single moment, that 
infinitesimal fraction of a second, which was passing 
now — and it was in the insignificance of this mo- 
ment, precisely, that religious persons must believe. 
So ran the teachings of all dead and lingering faiths 
alike. Here was, perhaps, only another instance of 
mankind’s abhorrence of actualities ; and man’s 
quaint dislike of facing reality was here disguised 
as a high moral principle. That was why all art, 
which strove to make the sensations of a moment 
soul-satisfying, was dimly felt to be irreligious. 
For art performed what religion only promised. 


27 - 

Evolution of a V estryman 


B UT, much as man’s religion looked to a more 
ordered and symmetrical existence to-morrow, 
just so, upon another scale, man’s daily life 
seemed a continuous looking- forward to a terrestrial 
to-morrow. fCeijnaston could find in the past — 
even h£, who was privileged to view the past in its 
actuality, rather than through the distorting media 
of books and national pride — no suggestion as to 
what, if Anything, he was expected to do while his 
physical life lasted, or to what, if anything, this 
life was a prelude. Yet that to-day was only a 
dull overtdre to to-morrow seemed in mankind an 
instinctive belief. All life everywhere, as all people 
spent it, was in preparation for something that was 
to happen to-morrow. This was as true of Antioch 
as Lichfield, as much the case with Charlemagne and 
Sardanapalus, with Agamemnon and Tiglath-Pi- 
leser, as with Felix Kennaston. 

Kennaston considered his own life. ... In child- 
154 


EVOLUTION OF A VESTRYMAN 


155 


hood you had looked forward to being a man — a 
trapper of the plains or a railway engineer or a 
pirate, for choice, but pending that, to get through 
the necessity of going to school five times a week. 
In vacations, of course, you looked forward to 
school’s beginning again, because next term was 
to be quite different from the last, and moreover 
because last session, in retrospection, did not appear 
to have been half bad. And of course you were al- 
ways wishing it would hurry up and be your birth- 
day, or Christmas, or even Easter. . . . Later, with 
puberty, had come the desire to be a devil with the 
women, like the fellows in Wycherley’s plays (a 
cherished volume, which your schoolmates, unac- 
countably, did not find sufficiently “spicy”) ; and to 
become a great author, like Shakespeare ; and to have 
plenty of money, like the Count of Monte-Cristo; 
and to be thrown with, and into the intimate confi- 
dence of, famous people, like the hero of a Scott 
novel. . . . Kennaston reflected that his touchstones 
seemed universally to have come from the library. 

. . . And Felix Kennaston had achieved his desire, 
to every intent, however unapt might be posterity to 
bracket him with Casanova or Don Juan, and how- 
ever many tourists still went with reverence to 
Stratford rather than Alcluid. He had money; 
and quite certainly he had met more celebrities than 


156 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


any other person living. Felix Kennaston reflected 
that, through accident’s signal favor, he had done 
all he had at any time very earnestly wanted to do; 
and that the result was always disappointing, and not 
as it was depicted in story-books. . . . He won- 
dered why he should again be harking back to liter- 
ary standards. 

Then it occurred to him that, in reality, he had 
always been shuffling through to-day — somehow 
and anyhow — in the belief that to-morrow the life 
of Felix Kennaston would be converted into a 
romance like those in story-books. 

The transfiguring touch was to come, it seemed, 
from a girl’s lips; but it had not; he kissed, and life 
remained uncharmed. It was to come from mar- 
riage, after which everything would be quite differ- 
ent ; but the main innovation was that he missed the 
long delightful talks he used to have with Kathleen 
(mostly about Felix Kennaston), since as married 
people they appeared only to speak to each other, in 
passing, as it were, between the discharge of various 
domestic and social duties, and to speak then of 
having seen So-and-so, and of So-and-so’s having 
said this-or-that. The transfiguring touch was to 
come from wealth; and it had not, for all that his 
address was in the Social Register, and was neatly 
typed in at the beginning of one copy of pretty much 


EVOLUTION OF A VESTRYMAN 


157 


every appeal sent broadcast by charitable organiza- 
tions. It was to come from fame; and it had not, 
even with the nine-day wonder over Men Who 
Loved Alison , and with Felix Kennaston’s pic- 
torial misrepresentation figuring in public journals, 
almost as prodigally as if he had murdered his wife 
with peculiar brutality or headed a company to sell 
inexpensive shoes. And, at the bottom of his heart, 
he was still expecting the transfiguring touch to 
come, some day, from something he was to obtain 
or do, perhaps to-morrow. . . . Then he had by 
accident found out the sigil’s power. . . . 

Men everywhere were living as he had lived. 
People got their notions of life, if only at second- 
er third-hand, from books, precisely as he had done. 
Even Amrou had derived his notions as to the value 
of literature from a book. Men pretended labori- 
ously that their own lives were like the purposeful 
and clearly motived life of book-land. In secret, 
the more perspicacious cherished the reflection that, 
anyhow, their lives would begin to be like that to- 
morrow. The purblind majority quite honestly be- 
lieved that literature was meant to mimic human life, 
and that it did so. And in consequence, their love- 
affairs, their maxims, their passions, their ethics, 
their conversations, their so-called natural ties and 
instincts, and above all, their wickednesses became 


158 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


just so many bungling plagiarisms from something 
they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or 
a newspaper. People progressed from the kinder- 
garten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion 
at every crisis was what books taught them was the 
appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it 
was in reality something quite different. Human 
life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to lit- 
erature : this much at least of Wilde’s old paradox — 
that life mimicked art — was indisputable. Human 
life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed 
word. Human life was prompted by, and was based 
upon, printed words — “in the beginning was the 
Word,” precisely as Gospel asserted. Kennaston 
had it now. Living might become symmetrical, well- 
plotted, coherent, and as rational as living was in 
books. This was the hope which guided human be- 
ings through to-day with anticipation of to-morrow. 

Then he perceived that there was no such thing 
as symmetry anywhere in inanimate nature. . . . 

It was Ettarre who first pointed out to him the 
fact, so tremendously apparent when once observed, 
that there was to be found nowhere in inanimate 
nature any approach to symmetry. It needed only a 
glance toward the sky the first clear night to show 
there was no pattern-work in the arrangement of the 
stars. Nor were the planets moving about the sun 


EVOLUTION OF A VESTRYMAN 


159 


at speeds or distances which bore any conceivable 
relation to one another. It was all at loose ends. He 
wondered how he could possibly have been misled 
by pulpit platitudes into likening this circumambient 
anarchy to mechanism. To his finicky love of 
neatness the universe showed on a sudden as a 
vast disheveled horror. There seemed so little har- 
mony, so faint a sense of order, back of all this 
infinite torrent of gyrations. Interstellar space 
seemed just a jumble of frozen or flaming spheres 
that, moving ceaselessly, appeared to avoid one an- 
other’s orbits, or to collide, by pure chance. This 
spate of stars-, as in three monstrous freshets, might 
roughly serve some purpose; but there was to be 
found no more formal order therein than in the flow 
of water-drops over a mill-wheel. 

And on earth there was no balancing in the dis- 
tribution of land and water. Continents approached 
no regular shape. Mountains stood out like pimples 
or lay like broken welts across the habitable ground, 
with no symmetry of arrangement. Rivers ran 
anywhither, just as the haphazard slope of earth’s 
crevices directed ; upon the map you saw quite clearly 
that these streams neither balanced one another nor 
watered the land with any pretense of equity. There 
was no symmetry anywhere in inanimate nature, no 
harmony, no equipoise of parts, no sense of form, 


160 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


not even a straight line. It was all at loose ends, 
except — bewilderingly — when water froze. For 
then, as the microscope showed you, the ice-crystals 
were arranged in perfect and very elaborate pat- 
terns. And these stellular patterns, to the mused 
judgment of Kennaston, appeared to have been 
shaped by the last love-tap of unreason — when, in 
completing all, unreason made sure that even here 
the universe should run askew to any conceivable 
“design” and lose even the coherency of being every- 
where irregular. 

But living things aimed toward symmetry. In 
plants the notion seemed rudimentary, yet the goal 
was recognizable. The branches of a tree did not put 
out at ordered distance, nor could you discern any 
definite plan in their shaping: but in the leaves, at 
least, you detected an effort toward true balance: 
the two halves of a leaf, in a rough fashion, were 
equal. In every leaf and flower and grass-blade you 
saw this never entirely successful effort. 

And in insects and reptiles and fish and birds 
and animals you saw again this effort, more credi- 
tably performed. All life seemed about the rather 
childish employment of producing a creature which 
consisted of two equal and exactly corresponding 
parts. It was true that in most cases this effort was 
foiled by an uneven distribution of color in plumage 


EVOLUTION OF A VESTRYMAN 


161 


or scales or hide; but in insects and in mankind the 
goal, so far as went the eye, was reached. Men and 
insects, to the eye at least, could be divided into two 
equal halves. . . . 

But even so, there was no real symmetry in man’s 
body save in externals. The heart was not in the 
•center; there was no order in the jumbled viscera; 
the two divisions of the brain did not correspond; 
there was nothing on the left side to balance the 
troublesome vermiform appendix on the right; even 
the limes in the palm of one hand were unlike those 
which marked the other: and everywhere, in fine, 
there was some irrational discrepancy. Man, the 
'highest form as yet of life, had attained at most only 
a teasing semblance of that crude symmetry to- 
ward which all life seemed to aim, and which inani- 
mate nature appeared to ignore. Nowhere in the 
universe could Kennaston discover any instance of 
quite equal balance, of anything which, as vision 
went, could be divided into two similar halves — save 
only in man’s handiwork. Here, again, insects ap- 
proached man’s efforts more closely than the rest of 
creation:; for many of them builded almost as truly. 
But man, alone in the universe, could produce exact 
visual symmetry, in a cathedral or a dinner-table or 
,a pair of scissors, just as man so curiously mimicked 
symmetry in his outward appearance. The circum* 


162 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


stance was droll, and no less quaint for the fact that 
it was perhaps without significance. . . . 

But Kennaston bemused himself with following 
out the notion that life was trying to evolve sym- 
metry — order, proportion and true balance. Living 
creatures represented, life’s gropings toward that 
goal. You saw, no doubt, a dim perception of this 
in the dream which sustained all human beings — that 
tomorrow living would begin to be symmetrical, 
well-plotted and coherent, like the progress of a 
novel. . . . And that was precisely what religion 
promised, only in more explicit terms, and with the 
story’s milieu' fixed in romantic, rather than realistic, 
settings. Kennaston had here the sensation of fit- 
ting in the last bit of a puzzle. Life, yearning for 
symmetry, stood revealed as artist. Life strove to 
ward the creation of art. That was all life cared 
about. Living things were more or less successful 
works of art, and were to be judged according to 
art’s canons alone. The universe was life’s big 
barren studio, which the Artist certainly had neither 
planned nor builded, but had, somehow, occupied, 
to make the best of its limitations. For Kennaston 
insisted that living things and inanimate nature had 
none of the earmarks of being by the same author. 
They were not in similar style, he said; thus, pre- 
supposing a sentient creator of the stars and planets,. 


EVOLUTION OF A VESTRYMAN 


163 


it would seem to have been in contradiction of his 
code to make both of a man’s eyes the same color. 

It was this course of speculation which converted 
Kennaston to an abiding faith in Christianity, such 
as, our rector informs me, is deplorably rare in these 
lax pleasure-loving days of materialism. To believe 
this inconsiderable planet the peculiar center of a 
God’s efforts and attention had for a long while 
strained Kennaston’s credulity: the thing was so 
woefully out of proportion when you considered 
earth’s relative value in the universe. But now Felix 
Kennaston comprehended that in the insensate uni- 
verse there was no proportion. The idea was un- 
known to the astral architect, or at best no part of 
his plan, if indeed there had been any premeditation 
or contriver concerned. Singly on our small earth — 
not even in the solar system of which earth made a 
part — was any sense of proportion evinced; and 
there it was apparent only in living things. Ken- 
naston seemed to glimpse an Artist-God, with a com- 
mendable sense of form — Kennaston’s fellow crafts- 
man — the earth as that corner of the studio wherein 
the God was working just now, and all life as a 
romance the God was inditing. . . . 

That the plot of this romance began with Eden 
and reached its climax at Calvary, Kennaston was 
persuaded, solely and ardently, because of the sur*» 


164 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


passing beauty of the Christ-legend. No other myth 
compared with it from an aesthetic standpoint. He 
could imagine no theme more adequate to sustain a 
great romance than this of an Author suffering 
willingly for His puppets' welfare; and mingling 
with His puppets in the similitude of one of them ; 
and able to wring only contempt and pity from His 
puppets — since He had not endowed them with any 
faculties wherewith to comprehend their Creator’s 
nature and intent. Indeed, it was pretty much the 
plight which Kennaston had invented for his own 
puppets at Storisende, as Kennaston complacently re- 
flected. It was the most tremendous “situation” im- 
aginable; and quite certainly no Author could ever 
have failed to perceive, and to avail Himself of, its 
dramatic possibilities. To conceive that the world- 
romance did not center upon Calvary was to presume 
an intelligent and skilled Romancer blind to the basic 
principles of His art. His sense of pathos and of 
beauty and of irony could have led Him to select no> 
other legend. And in the inconsistencies and un- 
solved problems, or even the apparent contradictions, 
of Christianity, Felix Kennaston could see only a 
possible error or omission on the Author’s part, such 
as was common to all romances. A few errata did’ 
not hamper the tale’s worth and splendor, or render 
it a whit less meritorious of admiration. . . . 


EVOLUTION OF A VESTRYMAN 


165 


And, indeed, Felix Kennaston found that his 
theory of the Atonement was in harmony with quite 
orthodox teachings. The library at Alcluid revealed 
bewildered and perturbed generations at guess-work. 
How could a God have been placated, and turned 
from wrath to benevolence, by witnessing the tor- 
ment of His own son ? What pleasure, whereby He 
was propitiated, could the God have derived from 
watching the scene on Calvary? Or was the God, 
as priests had taught so long (within the same mo- 
ment that they proclaimed the God’s omnipotence) 
not wholly a free agent, because bound by laws 
whereby He was compelled to punish some one for 
humanity’s disobedience, with the staggering option 
of substituting an innocent victim? For if you 
granted that, you conceded to be higher than the 
God, and overruling Him, a power which made for 
flat injustice. Since Schleiermacher’s time, at least, 
as Kennaston discovered, there had been reasoning 
creatures to contest the possibility of such discrepant 
assumptions, and a dynasty of teachers who ad- 
hered to the “subjective” theory of propitiation. For 
these considered that Christ came, not primarily to 
be crucified, but by his life to reveal to men the 
nature of their God. The crucifixion was an inci- 
dental, almost inevitable, result of human obtuse* 
ness; and was pregnant with value only in that 


166 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


thereby the full extent of divine love was perfectly 
evinced. The personality, rather than the sufferings, 
of the Nazarene had thus satisfied, not any demand 
or attribute of the God by acting upon it from 
without, “but God’s total nature by revealing it 
and realizing it in humanity.” The God, in short, 
had satisfied Himself “by revealing and expressing 
His nature” in the material universe, precisely as 
lesser artists got relief from the worries of existence 
by depicting themselves in their books. Just as poets 
express themselves communicatively in words, so 
here the Author had expressed Himself in flesh. 
Such, in effect, had been the teaching of Karl Im- 
manuel Nitzsch, of Richard Rothe, and of von 
Hofman, in Germany; of Auguste Bouvier in 
Geneva; of Alexandre Vinet, and of Auguste Sa- 
batier, in France; of Frederick Denison Maurice, 
and John Caird, and Benjamin Jowett, in England; 
and in America of Horace Bushnell, and Elisha 
Mulford, and William Newton Clarke. The list 
was imposing: and Kennaston rejoiced to find him- 
self at one with so many reputable theologians. For 
all these scholars had dimly divined, with whatever 
variousness they worded the belief, that the God’s 
satisfaction sprang, in reality, from the conscious- 
ness of having at last done a fine piece of artistic: 
work, in creating the character of Christ. . . . 


EVOLUTION OF A VESTRYMAN 


167 


So, as nearly as one can phrase the matter, it 
was really as a proof of confidence in his Author’s 
literary abilities that Felix Kennaston was presently 
confirmed at our little country church, to the delight 
of his wife and the approbation of his neighbors. It 
was felt to be eminently suitable: that such a quiet 
well-to-do man of his years and station should not 
be a communicant was generally, indeed, adjudged 
unnatural. And when William T. Vartrey (of the 
Lichfield Iron Works) was gathered to his grand- 
fathers, in the following autumn, Mr. Kennaston 
was rather as a matter of course elected to suc- 
ceed him in the vestry. And Kennaston was un- 
feignedly pleased and flattered. 

To the discerning it is easy enough to detect in all 
this fantastic theorizing the man’s obsessing love of 
ordered beauty and his abhorrence of slovenliness 
and shapelessness — very easy to see just what makes 
the writings of Felix Kennaston most admirable — 
here alluring him to believe that such ideals must 
also be cherished by Omnipotence. This poet loved 
his formal art to the extent of coming to assume 
it was the purpose and the origin of terrestrial 
life. Life seemed to him, in short, a God’s chosen 
form of artistic self-expression; and as a confrere, 
Kennaston found the result praiseworthy. Even in- 


168 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


animate nature, he sometimes thought, might be a 
divine experiment in vers libre. . . . But neither the 
justice of Kennaston’s airdrawn surmises, nor their 
wildness, matters; the point is that they made of 
him a vestryman who in appearance and speech and 
actions, and in essential beliefs, differed not at all 
from his associates in office, who had comfortably 
acquired their standards by hearsay. So that the 
moral of his theorizing should be no less obvious 
than salutary. 


28. 

The Shallowest Sort of Mysticism 


T HROUGH such airdrawn surmises, then, as 
I have just recorded did Felix Kennaston 
enter at last into that belief which is man’s 
noblest heritage. . . . 

“Or I would put it, rather, that belief is man’s 
metier,” Kennaston once corrected me — “for the 
sufficient reason that man has nothing to do with 
certainties. He cannot ever get in direct touch with 
reality. Such is the immutable law, the true cream 
of the jest. Felix Kennaston, so long as he wears 
the fleshl) r body of Felix Kennaston, is conscious 
only of various tiny disturbances in his brain-cells, 
which entertain and interest him, but cannot pretend 
to probe to the roots of reality about anything. By 
the nature of my mental organs, it is the sensation 
the thing arouses in my brain of which I am aware, 
and never of the thing itself. I am conscious only of 
appearances. They may all be illusory. I cannot 
169 


170 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


ever tell. But it is my human privilege to believe 
whatever I may elect.” 

“Yet, my dear sir,” as I pointed out, “is not this 
hair-splitting, really, a reduction of human life to 
the very shallowest sort of mysticism, that gets you 
nowhere?” 

“Now again, Harrowby, you are falling into the 
inveterate race-delusion that man is intended to get 
somewhere. I do not see that the notion rests on 
any readily apparent basis. It is at any rate a work- 
ing hypothesis that in the world-romance man, be- 
ing cast for the part of fool, quite obviously best 
furthers the denouement’s success by wearing his 
motley bravely. . . . There was a fool in my own 
romance, a character of no great importance; yet it 
was an essential incident in the story that he should 
irresponsibly mislay the King’s letter, and Sir Gui- 
ron thus be forced to seek service under Duke Flores- 
tan. Perhaps, in similar fashion, it is here necessary 
to the Author’s scheme that man must simply go 
on striving to gain a little money, food, and sleep, 
a trinket or two, some moments of laughter, and at 
the last a decent bed to die in. For it may well be 
that man’s allotted part calls for just these actions, to 
round out the drama artistically. Yes; it is quite 
conceivable that, much as I shaped events at Storis- 
ende, so here the Author aims toward making an 


SHALLOWEST SORT OF MYSTICISM 


171 


.aesthetic masterpiece of His puppet-play as a whole, 
rather than at ending everything with a transforma- 
tion scene such as, when we were younger, used so 
satisfactorily to close The Black Crook and The 
Devil's Auction . For it may well be that the Author 
has, after all, more in common with /Eschylus, say, 
than with the Charles H. Yale who catered to our 
boyhood with those spectacular diversions. ... So 
I must train my mind to be contented with appear- 
ances, whether they be true or not — reserving al- 
ways a permissible preference for the illusion which 
seems the more pleasant. Being mortal, I am able 
to contrive no thriftier bargain.” 

“Being mortal,” I amended, “we pick our recre- 
ations to suit our tastes. Now I, for instance — as is, 
indeed, a matter of some notoriety and derision here 
in Lichfield — am interested in what people loosely 
speak of as 'the occult/ I don’t endeavor to per- 
suade defunct poetesses to dictate via the Ouija 
board effusions which gave little encouragement as 
to the present state of culture in Paradise, or to 
induce Napoleon to leave wherever he is and devote 
his energies to tipping a table for me, you under- 
stand. . . . But I quite fixedly believe the Wardens 
of Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, that 
face on other worlds than ours. And some of us, I 
think, once in a while get a peep through these win- 


172 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


dows. But we are not permitted to get a long peep, 
or an unobstructed peep, nor, very certainly, are we 
permitted to see all there is — out yonder. The fatal 
fault, sir, of your theorizing is that it is too com- 
plete. It aims to throw light upon the universe, and 
therefore is self-evidently moonshine. The War- 
dens of Earth do not desire that we should under- 
stand the universe, Mr. Kennaston; it is part of 
Their appointed task to insure that we never do; and 
because of Their efficiency 1 every notion that any 
man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the 
universe will necessarily prove wrong. So, if for 
no other reason, I must decline to think of you and 
me as characters in a romance.” 


BOOK FIFTH 


“This was the measure of my soul's delight ; 
It had no power of joy to fly by day, 

Nor part in the large lordship of the light; 

But in a secret moon-beholden way 
Had all its will of dreams and pleasant night, 
And all the love and life that sleepers may. 

“But such life's triumph as men waking may 
It might not have to feed its faint delight ” 










Of Poetic Love: Treated with Poetic 
Inefficiency 


S O much for what Kennaston termed his “seri- 
ous reading” in chance-opened pages of the 
past. There were other dreams quite different 
in nature, which seemed, rather, to fulfil the function 
of romantic art, in satisfying his human craving' 
for a full-fed emotional existence — dreams which 
Kennaston jestingly described as “belles lettres.’" 
For now by turn — as murderer, saint, herdsman, 
serf, fop, pickpurse, troubadour, monk, bravo, lord- 
ling, monarch, and in countless other estates — Ken- 
naston tasted those fruitless emotions which it is 
the privilege of art to arouse — joys without any 
inevitable purchase-price, regrets that were not bit- 
ter, and miseries which left him not a penny the 
worse. 

But it was as a lover that his role most engrossed 
him, in many dreams wherein he bore for Ettarre 
such adoration as he had always wistfully hoped he 
might entertain toward some woman some day, 
175 


176 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


and had not ever known in his waking hours. It 
was sober truth he had spoken at Storisende : 
“There is no woman like you in my country, Ettarre. 
I can find no woman anywhere resembling you whom 
dreams alone may win to.” But now at last, even 
though it were only in dreams, he loved as he had 
always dimly felt he was capable of loving. . . . 
Even the old lost faculty of verse-making seemed 
to come back to him with this change, and he began 
again to fashion rhymes, elaborating bright odd 
vignettes of foiled love in out-of-the-way epochs and 
surroundings. These were the verses included, later, 
under the general title of “Dramatis Personae,” in his 
Chimes at Midnight. 

He wrote of foiled love necessarily, since not 
even as a lover might he win to success. It was the 
cream of some supernal jest that he might not touch 
Ettarre; that done, though but by accident, the 
dream ended, and the universe seemed to fold about 
him, just as a hand closes. He came to understand 
the reason of this. “Love must look toward some- 
thing not quite accessible, something not quite un- 
derstood,” he had said at Storisende : and this 
phrase, so lightly despatched, came home to him 
now as pregnant truth. For it was this fact which 
enabled him to love Ettarre, and had always pre- 
vented his loving any other woman. 


OF POETIC LOVE 


177 


All mortal women either loved some other man, 
and went with him somewhither beyond the area of 
your daily life, and so, in time were forgotten; or, 
else, they loved you, and laid bare to you their minds 
and bodies — and neither of these possessions ever 
proved so remarkable, when calmly viewed, as to 
justify continued infatuation therewith. Such at 
least Felix Kennaston had always found to be the 
case : love did not live, as lovers do, by feeding; but, 
paradoxically, got strength by hungering. It should 
be remembered, however, that Felix Kennaston was 
a poet. . . . 

He would sometimes think of the women who 
| had loved him ; and would speculate, with some wist- 
fulness, if it was invariably true, as with his own 
amorous traffic, that love both kept and left its 
victims strangers to each other? He knew so little 
of these soft-lipped girls and women, when every- 
thing was said. . . . 

Yet there had been — he counted — yes, time had 
known eight chaste and comely gentlewomen, in 
all, who had “given themselves to him,” as the hack- 
neyed phrase was. These eight affairs, at any 
event, had conformed to every tradition, and had 
been as thorough-going as might romantically be 
expected : but nothing much seemed to have come of 


178 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


them; and he did not feel in the upshot very well 
acquainted with their heroines. His sole emotion 
toward them nowadays was that of mild dislike. 
But six of them — again to utilize a venerable con- 
junction of words — had “deceived their husbands’" 
for the caresses of an impecunious Kennaston; and 
the other two had anticipatorily “deceived” the hus- 
bands they took later : so that they must, he reflected, 
have loved Felix Kennaston sincerely. He was quite 
certain, though, that he had never loved any one 
of them as he had always wanted to love. No one 
of these women had given him what he sought in 
vain. Kennaston had felt this lack of success dis- 
piritedly when, with soft arms about him,, it was 
necessary to think of what he would say next. He 
had always in such circumstances managed to feign 
high rapture, to his temporary companion’s entire 
satisfaction, as he believed; but each adventure left 
him disappointed. It had not roused in him the 
overwhelming emotions lovers had in books, nor 
anything resembling these emotions; and that was 
what he had wanted, and had not ever realized, until 
the coming of Ettarre. . . . 

He had made love, as a prevalent rule, to married 
women — allured, again, by bookish standards, which 
advanced the commerce of Lancelot with Guinevere, 
or of Paolo Malatesta with his brother’s wife, as 


OF POETIC LOVE 


179 


the supreme type of romantic ‘passion. On more 
practical grounds, Kennaston preferred married 
women, partly because they were less stupid to con- 
verse with in general, and in particular did not bring 
up the question of marrying you; and in part be- 
cause the husband in the background helped the 
situation pictorially — this notion also now seemed to 
be of literary origin — besides furnishing an unfail- 
ing topic of conversation. For unfaithful or wav- 
ering wives, to Kennaston’s finding, peculiarly de- 
lighted in talking about their husbands ; and in such 
prattle failed either to exhibit the conventional 
remorse toward, or any very grave complaint 
against, the discussed better-half. The inconsistency 
would have worried Kennaston’s sense of justice, 
had not these husbands always been so transparently 
certain of Kennaston’s insignificance . . . Al- 
though judging of necessity only from his own 
experience, Kennaston was unable conscientiously to 
approve of adulterous love-affairs : they tended too 
soon toward tediousness ; and married women 
seemed horribly quick to become matter-of-fact in 
the details of a liaison, and ready almost to confuse 
you with the husband. 

The giggle and chatter of young girls Kennaston 
had always esteemed unalluring, even in his own 
youth. He had admired a number of them ex- 


180 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


travagantly, but only as ornamental objects upon 
which very ill-advisedly had been conferred the 
gift of speech. To-day he looked back wistfully at 
times, as we must all do, to that girl who first had 
asked him if he was sure that he respected her as 
much as ever : but it was with the mental annotation 
that she had seven children now, and, as Kathleen 
put it, not a ray of good looks left. And he would 
meditate that he had certainly been fond of Mar- 
garet Hugonin, even though in the beginning it was 
her money which attracted him; and that Marian 
Winwood, despite her underhanded vengeance in 
publishing his letters, had been the most delectable 
of company all that ancient summer when it had 
rained so persistently. Then there had been tall 
Agnes Faroy, like a statue of gold and ivory; Kitty 
Provis, with those wonderful huge green eyes of 
hers ; and Celia Reindan, she who wore that curious 
silver band across her forehead ; and Helen Strong ; 
and Blanche Druro; and Muriel. ... In memory 
they arose like colorful and gracious phantoms, far 
more adorable than they had ever been on earth, 
when each of these had loaned, for a season, the 
touch of irresolute soft hands and friendly lips to 
a half- forgotten Felix Kennaston. All these, and 
others, had been, a long while since, the loveliest 
creatures that wore tender human flesh : and so, 


OF POETIC LOVE 


— r 

181 


they had kissed, and they had talked time-hallowed 
nonsense, and they had shed the orthodox tears; 
and — also a long while since — they had died or they 
had married the conventional some one else: and it 
did not matter the beard of an onion to the pudgy 
pasty man that Felix Kennaston had come to be. 
He had possessed, or else of his own volition he had 
refrained from possessing, all these brightly-colored 
moth-brained girls : but he had loved none of them 
as he had always known he was capable of loving: 
and at best, these girls were dead now, or at worst, 
they had been converted into unaccountable peo- 
ple. . . . 

Kathleen was returning from the South that day, 
and Kennaston had gone into Lichfield to meet her 
train. The Florida Express was late by a full hour ; 
so he sat in their motor-car, waiting, turning over 
some verses in his torpid mind, and just half-notic- 
ing persons who were gathering on the station plat- 
form to take the noon train going west. He was 
reflecting how ugly and trivial people’s faces appear 
when a crowd is viewed collectively — and wondering 
if the Author, looking down into a hot thronged 
street, was never tempted to obliterate the race as an 
unsuccessful experiment — when Kennaston recog- 
nized Muriel Allardyce. 


182 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


“I simply will not see her,” he decided. He turned 
his back that way, picked up the morning paper on 
the seat beside him, and began to read an editorial 
on immigration. What the deuce was she doing in 
Lichfield, any way? She lived in St. Louis now. 
She was probably visiting Avis Blagden. Evidently, 
she was going west on the noon train. If Kath- 
leen’s train arrived before midday he would have 
to get out of the car to meet her, and all three would 
come together on the platform. If Muriel spied him 
there, in the open car, it would be not uncharacteris- 
tic of her to join him. And he could not go away, 
because Kathleen’s train was apt to arrive any 
minute. It was perfectly damnable. Why could the 
woman not stay in St. Louis, where she belonged, 
instead of gadding about the country? Thus Ken- 
naston, as he re-read the statistics as to Poles and 
Magyars. 

“I think there’s two ladies trying to speak to you, 
sir,” the chauffeur hazarded. 

“Eh? — oh, yes!” said Kennaston. He looked, 
perforce, and saw that across the railway track both 
Muriel Allardyce and Avis Blagden were regarding 
him with idiotic grins and wavings. He lifted his 
hat, smiled, waved his own hand, and retired between 
the pages of the Lichfield Courier-Herald. Muriel 
was wearing a light traveling veil, he reflected; he 


OF POETIC LOVE 


183 


could pretend not to know who she was. With rec- 
ognition, of course, he would be expected to come 
over and speak to her. He must remember to ask 
Avis, the very next time he saw her, who had been 
that familiar-looking person with her, and to express 
regret for his short-sightedness. . . . 

He decided to step out of the car, by way of the 
farther door, and buy a package of cigarettes on the 
other side of the street. He could loaf there and 
pray that Muriel’s train left before Kathleen’s ar- 
rived. . . . 

“I don’t believe you recognized us,” said Avis 
Blagden, at his elbow. “Or else you are trying 
to cut your old playmates.” The two women had 
brazenly pursued him. They were within a yard of 
him. It was indelicate. It was so perfectly un- 
necessary. He cordially wished some friendly en- 
gine had run them both down when they were cross- 
ing the tracks. . . . 

“Why, bless my soul!” he was saying, “this is 
indeed a delightful surprise. I had no idea you 
were in town, Mrs. Allardyce. I didn’t recognize 
you, with that veil on — ” 

“There’s Peter, at last,” said Avis. “I really 
must speak to him a moment.” And she promptly 
left them. Kennaston reflected that the whole 
transaction was self-evidently pre-arranged. And 


184 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


Muriel was, as if abstractedly, but deliberately, 
walking beyond earshot of the chauffeur. And there 
was nothing for it save to accompany her. 

“It’s awfully jolly to see you again,” he observed, 
with fervor. 

“Is it? Honestly, Felix, it looked almost as if 
you were trying to avoid me.” Kennaston won- 
dered how he could ever have loved a woman of so 
little penetration. 

“No, I didn’t recognize you, with that veil on,” 
he repeated. “And I had no idea you were in Lich- 
field. I do hope you are going to pay us all a nice 
long visit — ” 

“But, no, I am leaving on this train — ” 

“Oh, I say, but that’s too bad! And I never 
knew you were here!” he lamented. 

“I only stopped overnight with Avis. I am on 
my way home — ” 

“To Leonard?” And Kennaston smiled. “How 
do you get on with him nowadays ?” 

“We are — contented, I suppose. He has his busi- 
ness — and politics. He is doing perfectly splendidly 
now, you know. And I have my memories.” Her 
voice changed. “I have my memories, Felix ! Noth- 
ing — nothing can take that from me !” 

“Good God, Muriel, there are a dozen people 
watching us — ” 


OF POETIC LOVE 


185 


“What does that matter !” 

“Well, it matters a lot to me. I live here, you 
know/ 1 

She was silent for a moment. “You look your 
latest role in life so well, too, Felix. You are the 
respectable married gentleman to the last detail. 
Why, you are an old man now, Felix,” she said 
wistfully. “Your hair is gray about the ears, and 
you are fat, and there are wrinkles under your eyes- — • 
But are you happy, dear ?” she asked, with the grave 
tender speech that he remembered. And momen- 
tarily the man forgot the people about them, and the 
fact that his wife’s train was due any minute. 

“Happier than I deserve to be, Muriel.” His 
voice had quavered — had quavered in fact very 
nicely, it appeared to him. 

“That’s true, at least,” the woman said, as in 
reflection. “You treated me rather abominably, you 
know — like an old shoe.” 

“I am not altogether sorry you take that view 
of it. For I wouldn’t want you to regret — any- 
thing — not even that which, to me at least, is very 
sacred. But there was really nothing else to do 
save just to let things end. It was as hard,” he 
said, with a continuous flight of imagination, “it was 
as hard on me as you.” 

“Sometimes I think it was simply because you 


186 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


were afraid of Leonard. I put that out of my 
mind, though, always. You see, I like to keep my 
memories. I have nothing else now, Felix — ” She 
opened the small leather bag* she carried, took out 
a handkerchief, and brushed her lips. “I am a fool, 
of course. Oh, it is funny to see your ugly little 
snub nose again! And I couldn’t help wanting to 
speak to you, once more — ” 

“It has been delightful. And some day I certainly 
do hope — But there’s your train, I think. The 
gates are going down.” 

“And here is Avis coming. So good-by, Felix. 
It is really forever this time, I think — ” 

It seemed to him that she held in her left hand the 
sigil of Scoteia. . . . He stared at the gleaming 
thing, then raised his eyes to hers. She was smil- 
ing. Her eyes were the eyes of Ettarre. All the 
beauty of the world seemed gathered in this woman’s 
face. . . . 

“Don’t let it be forever! Come with me, Felix! 
There is only you — even now, there is only you. It 
is not yet too late — ” Astounding as were the 
words, they came quite clearly, in a pleading fright- 
ened whisper. 

The man was young for just that one wonderful 
moment of inexplicable yearning and self-loathing. 
Then, “I am afraid my wife would hardly like 


OF POETIC LOVE 


187 


it,” he said, equably. “So good-by, Muriel. It has 
been very delightful to see you again.” 

“I was mistaken, though, of course. It was the 
top of a vanity-box, or of a toilet-water flask, or of 
something else, that she took out of the bag, when 
she was looking for her handkerchief. It was just 
a silly coincidence. I was mistaken, of course. . . . 
And here is Kathleen’s train. Thank goodness, it 
was late enough. ...” 

Thus Kennaston, as he went to receive his wife’s 
cool kiss. And — having carefully mentioned as 
a matter of no earthly importance that he had jusl. 
seen Muriel Allardyce, and that she had gone off 
terribly in looks, and that none of them seem to 
hold their own like you, dear — he debarred from 
mind that awkward moment’s delusion, and tried 
not to think of it any more. 


30 - 

Cross-Purposes in Spacious Times 


S O Kennaston seemed to have got only disap- 
pointment and vexation and gainless vague 
regret from his love-affairs in the flesh; and 
all fleshly passion seemed to flicker out inevitably, 
however splendid the brief blaze. For you loved 
and lost; or else you loved and won: there was 
quick ending either way. And afterward unac- 
countable women haunted you, and worried you into 
unreasonable contrition, in defiance of common- 
sense. . . . 

But for Ettarre, who embodied all Kennaston 
was ever able to conceive of beauty and fearlessness 
and strange purity, all perfections, all the attributes 
of divinity, in a word, such as his slender human 
faculties were competent to understand, he must 
hunger always in vain. Whatever happened, Et- 
tarre stayed inaccessible, even in dreams : her beauty 
was his to look on only ; and always when he came too 
near that radiant loveliness which was Ettarre’s — 
188 


CROSS-PURPOSES IN SPACIOUS TIMES 189 


that perfect beauty which was so full of troubling 
reticences, and so, was touched with something sinis- 
ter — the dream would end, and the universe would 
seem to fold about him, just as a hand closes. Such 
was the law, the kindly law, as Kennaston now be- 
lieved, through which love might thrive even in the 
arid heart of a poet. 

Sometimes, however, this law would lead to odd 
results, and left the dream an enigma. For instance, 
he had a quaint experience upon the night of that 
day during which he had talked with Muriel Allar- 
dyce. . . . 

“You are in all things a fortunate man, Master 
— ah — whatever your true name may be,” said the 
boy, pettishly flinging down the cards. 

“Ods life, and have we done?” says Kennas- 
ton. . . . 

The two sat in a comfortable paneled room. 
There was a big open fire behind Kennaston; he 
could see its reflections flicker about the wood-work. 
The boy facing him was glowingly attired in green 
and gold, an ardent comely urchin, who (as Ken- 
naston estimated) might perhaps be a page to Queen 
Elizabeth, or possibly was one of King James’s spoilt 
striplings. Between them was a rough deal table, 
littered with playing-cards ; and upon it sat a tallish 


190 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


blue pitcher half-full of wine, four lighted candles 
stuck like corks in as many emptied bottles, and two 
coarse yellow mugs. . . . 

“Yes, we have done,” the boy answered; and, 
rising, smiled cherubically. “May I ask what is the 
object that you conceal with such care in your left 
hand?” 

“To be candid,” Kennaston returned, “it is the 
King of Diamonds, that swarthy bearded Spaniard. 
I had intended it should serve as a corrective and 
encourager of Lady Fortune, when I turned it, my 
next deal, as the trump card. I’ faith, I thank God 
I have found the jade is to be influenced by such 
feats of manual activity. Oh, ay, sir, I may say it 
without conceit that my fingers have in these matters 
tolerable compass and variety.” 

“A card-sharp!” sneers the boy. “La, half of 
us suspected it already; but it will be rare news to 
the town that Master Lionel Branch — as I must 
continue to call you — stands detected in such Greek 
knaveries.” 

“Nay, but you will hardly live to moralize of it, 
sir. Oh, no, sir, indeed my poor arts must not be 
made public: for I would not seem to boast of my 
accomplishments. Harkee, sir, I abhor vain-glory. 
I name no man, sir; but I know very well there are 
snotty-nosed people who accord these expedients to 


CROSS-PURPOSES IN SPACIOUS TIMES 191 


amend the quirks of fate their puritan disfavor. 
Hah, but, signior, what is that to us knights of 
the moon, to us gallants of generous spirit? — Oh, 
Lord, sir, I protest I look upon such talents much 
as I do upon my breeches. I do consider them as 
possessions, not certainly to be vaunted, but indis- 
pensable to any gentleman who hopes to make a 
pleasing figure in the world’s eye.” 

“All this bluster is wordy foolery, Master Branch. 
What I have seen, I have seen ; and you will readily 
guess how I mean to use my knowledge.” 

“I would give a great deal to find out what he 
is talking about,” was Kennaston’s reflection. “I 
have discovered, at least, that my present alias is 
Branch, but that I am in reality somebody else.” 
Aloud he said: “’Fore God, your eyesight is of 
the best, Master Skirlaw — {How the deuce did 1 
know his name y now f) — Hah, I trust forthwith to 
prove if your sword be equally keen.” 

“I will fight with no cheats — ” 

“I’ faith, sir, but I have heard that wine is a 
famed provoker of courage. Let us try the by- 
word.” So saying, Kennaston picked up one mug, 
and flung its contents full in the boy’s face. It was 
white wine, Kennaston noted, for it did not stain 
Master Skirlaw’s handsome countenance at all. 

“The insult is sufficient. Draw, and have done!” 


192 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


the lad said quietly. His sword gleamed in the res- 
tive reflections of that unseen fire behind Kennaston. 

“Na, na ! but, my most expeditious cockerel, surely 
this place is a thought too public? Now yonder is a 
noble courtyard. Oh, ay, favored by to-night’s 
moon, we may settle our matter without any hin- 
drance or intolerable scandal. So, I will call my 
host, that we may have the key. Yet, upon my 
gentility, Master Skirlaw, I greatly fear I shall be 
forced to kill you. Therefore I cry you mercy, sir, 
but is there on your mind no business which you 
would not willingly leave undischarged ? Save you, 
friend, but we are all mortal. Hah, to a lady whom 
I need not name, it is an affair of considerable im- 
port what disposition a bold man might make of this 
ring— M 

Leering, Kennaston touched the great signet-ring 
on the lad’s thumb; and forthwith the universe 
seemed to fold about him, just as a hand closes. In 
this brief moment of inexplicable yearning and self- 
loathing he comprehended that the boy’s face was 
the face of Ettarre. 

And Kennaston, awake, was pleading, with 
meaningless words: “Valentia! forgive me, Val- 
entia! . . 


And that was all. This dream remained an 


CROSS-PURPOSES IN SPACIOUS TIMES 193 


enigma. Kennaston could never know what events 
had preceded this equivocal instant, or how Ettarre 
came to be disguised as a man, or what were their 
relations in this dream, nor, above all, why he 
should have awakened crying upon the name of 
Valentia. It was simply a law that always when he 
was about to touch Ettarre — even unconsciously — 
everything must vanish; and through the workings 
of that law this dream, with many others, came to 
be just a treasured moment of unexplainable but 
poignant emotion. 


3i* 

Horvendile to Ettarre : At Whitehall 


T O Kennaston the Lord Protector was say- 
ing, with grave unction : “You will, I doubt 
not, fittingly express to our friends in Vir- 
ginia, Master Major, those hearty sentiments which 
I have in the way of gratefulness, in that I have 
received the honor and safeguard of their approba- 
tion; for all which I humbly thank them. To our 
unfriends in that colony we will let action speak when 
I shall have completed God’s work in Ireland.” 

“Yet the Burgesses, sir, are mostly ill-affected; 
and Berkeley, to grant him justice, does not lack 
bravery — ” 

“With Heaven’s help, Master Major, I have of 
late dealt with a king who did not lack bravery. 
Nay, depend upon it, I shall some day grant Wil- 
liam Berkeley utter justice — such justice as I gave 
his master, that proud curled man, Charles Stuart.” 
Then the Lord Protector’s face was changed, and his 
harsh countenance became a little troubled. “Yes, I 
194 


HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE 


195 


shall do all this, with Heaven’s help, I think. But 
in good faith, I grow old, Master Major. I move 
in a mist, and my deeds are strange to me. . . .” 

Cromwell closed and unclosed his hands, regard- 
ing them; and he sighed. Then it was to Ettarre 
he spoke: 

“I leave you in Master Major’s charge. It may 
be I shall not return alive into England; indeed, 
I grow an old man and feel infirmities of age steal- 
ing upon me. And so, farewell, my lass. Truly 
if I love you not too well, I err not on the other 
hand much. Thou hast been dearer to me than any 
other creature: let that suffice.” And with this 
leave-taking he was gone. 

As the door closed upon Cromwell’s burly figure, 
“No, be very careful not to touch me,” Kennaston 
implored. “The dream must last till I have found 
out how through your aid, Ettarre, this bull-necked 
country squire has come to rule England. It is pre- 
cisely as I expected. You explain Cromwell, you 
explain Mohammed — Richelieu and Tamburlaine 
and Julius Caesar, I suspect, and, as I know, Na- 
poleon — all these men who have inexplicably risen 
from nothing to earthly supremacy. How is it done, 
Ettarre?” 

“It is not I who contrive it, Horvendile. I am 
but an incident in such men’s lives. They have 


196 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


known me — yes : and knowing me, they were bent 
enough on their own ends to forget that I seemed 
not unlovely. It is not the sigil and the power the 
sigil gives which they love and serve — ” 

“And that small square mirror, such as Crom- 
well also carried — ?” Kennaston began. “Or is 
this forbidden talk?” 

“Yes, that mirror aids them. In that mirror they 
can see only themselves. So the mirror aids toward 
the ends they chose, with open eyes. . . . But you 
cannot ever penetrate these mysteries now, Horven- 
dile. The secret of the mirror was offered you once:, 
and you would not bargain. The secret of the mirror 
is offered to no man twice.” 

And he laughed merrily. “What does it matter? 
I am perfectly content. That is more than can be 
said for yonder sanctimonious fat old rascal, who 
has just told me he is going into Ireland ‘for the 
propagating of the gospel of Christ, the establishing 
of truth and peace, and the restoring of that bleeding 
nation to its former happiness and tranquillity/ 
Why is it that people of executive ability seem al- 
ways to be more or less mentally deficient? Now, 
you and I know that, in point of fact, he is going 
into Ireland to burn villages, massacre women, hang 
bishops, and generally qualify his name for all time 
as a Hibernian synonym for infamy. Oh, no, the 


HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE 


197 


purchase-price of grandeur is too great; and men 
that crown themselves in this world inevitably per- 
form the action with soiled hands. Still, I wish I 
had known I was going visiting to-night in seven- 
teenth-century England,” said Kennaston, reflec- 
tively; “then I could have read up a bit. I don’t 
even know whether Virginia ever submitted to him. 
It simply shows what idleness may lead to! If I 
had studied history more faithfully I would have 
been able to-night to prophesy to Oliver Cromwell 
about the results of his Irish campaigns and so on, 
and could have impressed him vastly with my abili- 
ties. As it is, I have missed an opportunity which 
will probably never occur again to any man of my 
generation. . . 


32 - 

Horvendile to Ettarre : At Vaux-le-Vicomte 


«IIT HAT fun!” says Kennaston; “we are 
V Y at Vaux-le-Vicomte, where Fouquet is 
entertaining young Louis Quatorze. 
Yonder is La Valliere — the thin tow-headed girl, 
with the big mouth. People are just beginning to 
whisper scandal about her. And that tall jade is 
Athenais de Tonnay-Charente — the woman who is 
going to be Madame de Montespan and control 
everything in the kingdom later on, you remember. 
The King is not yet aware of her existence, nor has 
Monsieur de Montespan been introduced. . . . 

“The Troupe of Monsieur is about to present an 
open-air comedy. It is called Les Facheux — The 
Bores. It is rumored to take off very cleverly the 
trivial tedious fashion in which perfectly well-mean- 
ing people chatter their way through life. But that 
more fittingly would be the theme of a tragedy, Et- 
tarre. Men are condemned eternally to bore one 
another. Two hundred years and more from to- 
198 


HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE 


199 


da y perhaps forever — man will lack means, or 
courage, to voice his actual thoughts adequately. 
He must still talk of weather probabilities and of 
having seen So-and-so and of such trifles, that mean 
absolutely nothing to him — and must babble of these 
things even to the persons who are most dear and 
familiar to him. Yes, every reputable man must des- 
perately make small-talk, and echo and re-echo sense- 
less phrases, until the crack of doom. He will ah 
ways be afraid to bare his actual thoughts and in- 
terests to his fellows’ possible disapproval: or per- 
haps it is just a pitiable mania with the race. At 
all events, one should not laugh at this ageless 
aspersion and burlesque of man’s intelligence as per- 
formed by man himself. . . . 

‘The comedy is quite new. A marquis, with 
wonderful canions and a scented wig like an edifice, 
told me it is by an upholsterer named Coquelin, a 
barnstormer who rail away from home and has been 
knocking about the provinces unsuccessfully for 
nearly twenty years : and my little marquis wondered 
what in the world we are coming to, when Monsieur 
le Surintendent takes up with that class of people. 
Is not my little marquis droll ? — for he meant Poque- 
lin, soon to be Poquelin de Moliere, of course. 
Moliere, also, is a name which is not famous as yet. 
But in a month or so it will be famous for all time; 


200 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


and Monsieur le Surintendent will be in jail and 
forgotten. . . . 

“You smile, Ettarre? Ah, yes, I understand. 
Moliere too adores you. All poets have had fitful 
glimpses of you, Ettarre, and of that perfect beauty 
which is full of troubling reticences, and so, is 
touched with something sinister. I have written as 
to the price they pay, these hapless poets, in a little 
book I am inditing through that fat pudgy body I 
wear in the flesh. . . . Do not frown: I know it 
is forbidden to talk with you concerning my life in 
the flesh. . . . 

“Ah, the King comes — evidently in no very ami- 
able frame of mind — and all rise, like a flurry of 
great butterflies. It is the beginning of the play. 
See, a woman is coming out of the big shell in the 
fountain. . . . 

“I wish my old friend Jonas d’Artagnan were 
here. It is a real pity he is only a character in 
fiction — just as I once thought you to be, Ettarre. 
Eh, what a fool I was to imagine I had created you ! 
and that I controlled your speech and doings! I 
know much better now. . . . 

“Ettarre, your unattainable beauty tears my heart. 
Is that black-browed Moliere your lover too ? What 
favors have you granted him? You perceive I am 
jealous. How can I be otherwise, when there is 


HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE 


201 


nothing, nothing in me that does not cry out for love 
of you? And I am forbidden ever to win quite to 
you, ever to touch you, ever to see you even save in 
my dreams!” 


33 - 

Horvendile to Ettarre : In the Conciergerie 


T HEY waited in a big dark room of the Con- 
ciergerie, with many other condemned emi- 
grants, until the tumbrils should come to 
fetch them to the Place de la Revolution. They 
stood beneath a narrow barred window, set high 
in the wall, so that thin winter sunlight made the 
girl’s face visible. Misery was about them, death 
waited without : and it did not matter a pennyworth. 

“Ettarre, I know to-day that all my life I have 
been seeking you. Very long ago when I was a 
child it was made clear that you awaited me some- 
where; and, I recollect now, I used to hunger for 
your coming with a longing which has not any 
name. And when I went about the dusty world I 
still believed you waited somewhere — till I should 
find you, as I inevitably must, or soon or late. Did 
I go upon a journey to some unfamiliar place? — 
it might be that unwittingly I traveled toward your 
home. I could never pass a walled garden where 
202 


HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE 


203 


green tree-tops showed, without suspecting, even 
while I shrugged to think how wild was the imag- 
ining, that there was only the wall between us. I 
did not know the color of your eyes, but I knew 
what I would read there. And for a fevered season 
I appeared to encounter many women of earth who 
resembled you — ” 

“All women resemble me, Horvendile. What- 
ever flesh they may wear as a garment, and however 
time-frayed or dull-hued or stained by horrible mis- 
use that garment may seem to be, the wearer of that 
garment is no less fair than I, could any man see 
her quite clearly. Horvendile, were that not true, 
could our great Author find anywhere a woman’s 
body which wickedness and ugliness controlled un- 
checked, all the big stars which light the universe, 
and even the tiny sun that our earth spins about, 
would be blown out like unneeded candles, for the 
Author’s labor would have been frustrated and mis- 
spent.” 

“Yes; I know now that this is true. . . . See, 
Ettarre! Yonder woman is furtively coloring her 
cheeks with a little wet red rag. She does not wish 
to seem pale — or is it that she wishes to look her 
best? — in the moment of death. . . . Ettarre, my 
love for you whom I could not ever find, was not 
of earth, and I could not transfer it to any of our 


204 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


women. The lively hues, the lovely curvings and 
the fragrant tender flesh of earth’s women were 
deft to cast their spells; but presently I knew this 
magic was only of the body. It might be I was 
honoring divinity; but it was certain that even in 
such case I was doing so by posturing before my 
divinity’s effigy in tinted clay. Besides, it is not 
possible to know with any certainty what is going 
on in the round glossy little heads of women. T 
hide no secrets from you, because I love you,’ say 
they? — eh, and their love may be anything from a 
mild preference to a flat lie. And so, I came finally 
to concede that all women are creatures of like 
frailties and limitations and reserves as myself, and 
I was most poignantly lonely when I was luckiest in 
love. Once only, in my life in the flesh, it seemed 
to me that a woman, whom I had abandoned, held in 
her hand the sigil visibly. That memory has often 
troubled me, Ettarre. It may be that this woman 
could have given me what I sought everywhere in 
vain. But I did not know this until it was too late, 
until the chance and the woman’s life alike were 
wasted. . . . And so, I grew apathetic, senseless 
and without any spurring aspiration, seeing that all 
human beings are so securely locked in the prison of 
their flesh.” 

“When immortals visit earth it is necessary they 


HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE 


205 


assume the appearance of some animal. Very long 
, ago, as we have seen, Horvendile, was discovered 
that secret, which so many myths veil thinly: and 
have we not learned, too, that the animal's fleshly 
body is a disguise which it is possible to put aside?” 

“That knowledge, so fearfully purchased at the 
Sabbat, still troubles me, Ettarre. Yes, it is per- 
turbing to be assured I am only a garment which 
is sometimes worn by that Horvendile who is of the 
Leshy, and who shifts other puppets than I can 
imagine. For I am an overweening garment, Et- 
tarre, — or rather, let us say, I flauntingly esteem 
myself a fine feather in the cap of this eternal Hor- 
vendile. So does it sometimes seem to my vain- 
glorious self-conceit that even this demiurgic Hor- 
vendile and his Poictesme, and, for that matter, all 
the living anywhere in this world, are only the no- 
tions of a certain fat and flabby dreamer — ” 

“Nobody can think that, dear Horvendile, so long 
as he recalls the Sabbat — ” 

“Indeed, I am not likely to forget the Sabbat. . . . 
Monsieur le Prince, I regret the circumstance, but 
as you see — my snuff-box is quite empty. Ah, but 
yes, as you very justly observe, rappee, repose and 
rationality are equally hard to come by in these mad 
days. ... Is that not droll, Ettarre? This un- 
venerable old Prince de Gatinais— once Grand Duke 


206 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


of Noumaria, you remember — has in his career been 
guilty of every iniquity and meanness and coward- 
ice : now, facing instant death, he finds time to think 
of snuff and phrase-making. . . . But — to go back 
a little — I had thought the Sabbat would be so dif- 
ferent! One imagined there would be cauldrons, 
and hags upon prancing broomsticks, and a black 
Goat, of course — ” 

u How much more terrible it is — and how beau- 
tiful r 

“Yet — even now I may not touch you, Ettarre.” 

“My friend, all men have striven to do that; 
and I have evaded each one of them at the last, and 
innumerable are the ways of my elusion. There is 
no man but has loved me, no man that has forgotten 
me, and none but has attempted to express that 
which he saw and understood when I was visible.’ , 

“Do I not know ? There is no beauty in the world 
save those stray hints of you, Ettarre. Canvas and 
stone and verse speak brokenly of you sometimes; 
all music yearns toward you, Ettarre, all sunsets 
whisper of you, and it is because they awaken mem- 
ories of you that the eyes of all children so obscurely 
trouble and delight us. Ettarre, your unattainable 
beauty tears my heart. There is nothing, nothing in 
me that does not cry out for love of you. And it is 
the cream of a vile jest that I am forbidden ever to 


HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE 


207 


win quite to you, ever to touch you, ever to see you 
even save in my dreams !” 

“Already this dream draws toward an end, my 
poor Horvendile.” 

And he saw that the great doors — which led to 
death — were unclosing: and beyond them he saw 
confusedly a mob of red-capped men, of malignant 
frenzied women, of wide-eyed little children, and 
the staid officials, chatting pleasantly among them- 
selves, who came to fetch that day’s tale of those 
condemned to the guillotine. But more vividly Ken- 
naston saw Ettarre and how tenderly she smiled, 
in thin wintry sunlight, as she touched Kennaston 
upon the breast, so that the dream might end and he 
might escape the guillotine. 


34 - 

Of One Enigma That Threatened to 
Prove Allegorical 


T HEN again Kennaston stood alone before a 
tall window, made up of many lozenge- 
shaped panes of clear glass set in lead frame- 
work. He had put aside one of the two great cur- 
tains — of a very fine stuff like gauze, stitched over 
with transparent glittering beetle-wings, and em- 
broidered with tiny seed pearls — which hung be- 
fore this window. 

Snow covered the expanse of house-tops without, 
and the sky without was glorious with chill stars. 
That white city belonged to him, he knew, with a 
host of other cities. He was the strongest of kings. 
People dreaded him, he knew ; and he wondered why 
any one should esteem a frail weakling such as he 
to be formidable. The hand of this great king — 
his own hand, that held aside the curtain before him 
— was shriveled and colorless as lambs’ wools. It 
was lixe a horrible bird-claw. 

208 


OF ONE ENIGMA 


209 


(“But then I have the advantage of remembering 
the twentieth century ” he thought, fleetingly, “and 
all my contemporaries are superstitious ignorant 
folk. It is strange, but in this dream I appear to be 
an old man. That never happened before.”) 

A remote music resounded in his ears, and cloying 
perfumes were about him. . . . 

“I want to be happy. And that is impossible, 
because there is no happiness anywhere in the world. 
I, a great king, say this — I, who am known in 
unmapped lands, and before whom nations tremble. 
For there are but three desirable things in life — love 
and power and wisdom: and I, the king, have 
sounded the depths of these, and in none is happi- 
ness.” 

r 

Despairing words came to him now, and welled to 
his lips, in a sort of chaunt : 

“1 am sad to-night, for I remember that I once 
loved a woman. She was white as the moon; het 
hair was a gold cloud; she had untroubled eyes. 
She was so fair that I longed for her until my heart 
was as the heart of a God. But she sickened and 
died : worms had their will of her, not I. So I took 
other women, and my bed was never lonely. Bright 
poisonous women were brought to me, from beyond 
the sunset, from the Fortunate Islands, from Invallis 
and Planasia even; and these showed me nameless 


210 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


endearments and many curious perverse pleasures. 
But I was not able to forget that woman who was 
denied me because death had taken her : and I grew 
a-weary of love, for I perceived that all which has 
known life must suffer death. 

“There was no people anywhere who could with- 
stand my armies. We traveled far in search of such 
a people. My armies rode into a country of great heat 
and endless sands, and contended with the Presby- 
ter’s brown horsemen, who fought with arrows and 
brightly painted bows; and we slew them. My 
armies entered into a land where men make their 
homes in the shells of huge snails, and feed upon 
white worms which have black heads; and we slew 
them. My armies passed into a land where a people 
that have no language dwell in dark caves under the 
earth, and worship a stone that has sixty colors ; and 
we slew them, teaching ruthlessly that all which 
has known life must suffer death. 

“Many stiff-necked kings, still clad in purple and 
scarlet and wearing gold crowns — monarchs whose 
proud faces, for all that these men were my slaves, 
kept their old fashion and stayed changeless as the 
faces of statues — such were my lackeys: and I 
burned walled cities. Empires were my playthings, 
but I had no son to inherit after me. I had no son — 
only that dead horrible mangled worm, born dead, 


OF ONE ENIGMA 


211 


that I remember seeing very long ago where the 
woman I loved lay dead. That would have been my 
son had the thing lived — a greater and a nobler king 
than I. But death willed otherwise : the life that 
moved in me was not to be perpetuated : and so, the 
heart in my body grew dried and little and shriveled, 
like a parched pea : for I perceived that all which has 
known life must suffer death. 

“Then I turned from warfare, and sought .for 
wisdom. I learned all that it is permitted any man to 
know — oh, I learned more than is permissible. Have 
I not summoned demons from the depths of the sea, 
and at the Sabbat have I not smitten haggard Gods 
upon the cheek? Yea, at Phigalia did I not pass 
beneath the earth and strive with a terrible Black 
Woman, who had the head of a horse, and wrest 
from her what I desired to know? Have I not 
talked with Morskoi, that evil formless ruler of the 
Sea-Folk, and made a compact with him? And has 
not even Phobetor, whose real name may not be 
spoken, revealed to me his secrets, at a paid price 
of which I do not care to think, now I perceive that 
all which has known life must suffer death? 

“Yea, by the Hoofs of the Goat ! it seems to me 
that I have done these things; yet how may I be 
sure? For I have learned, too, that all man’s senses 
lie to him, that nothing we see or hear or touch is 


212 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


truthfully reported, and that the visible world at 
best stands like an island in an uncharted ocean 
which is a highway, none the less, for much alien 
traffic. Yet, it seems to me that I found means 
whereby the universe I live in was stripped of many 
veils. It seems to me that I do not regret having 
done this. . . . But presently I shall be dead, and 
all my dearly-purchased, wearily-earned wisdom 
must lie quiet in a big stone box, and all which has 
known life must suffer death. 

“For death is mighty, and against it naught can 
avail : it is terrible and strong and cruel, and a lover 
of bitter jests. And presently, whatever I have done 
or studied or dreamed, I must lie helpless where 
worms will have their will of me, and neither the 
worms nor I will think it odd, because we have 
both learned — by how countless attestings ! — that all 
which has known life must suffer death.” 
i A remote music resounded in his ears, and 
cloying perfumes were about him. Turning, he saw 
that the walls of this strange room were of irides- 
cent lacquer, worked with bulls and apes and parrots 
in raised gold: black curtains screened the doors: 
and the bare floor was of smooth sea-green onyx. A 
woman stood there, who did not speak, but only 
waited. So did he perceive what terror was, for 
terror possessed him utterly; and yet he was elated. 


OF ONE ENIGMA 


213 


“You have come, then, at last. . . 

“To you at last I have come as I come to all 
men,” she answered, “in my good hour.” And 
Ettarre’s hands, gleaming and half-hidden with 
jewels, reached toward his hands, so gladly raised 
to hers ; and the universe seemed to fold about him, 
just as a hand closes. 

Was it as death she came to him in this dream? 
— as death made manifest as man’s liberation from 
much vain toil? Kennaston, at least, preferred to 
think his dreams were not degenerating into such 
hackneyed crude misleading allegories. Or perhaps 
it v/as as ghost of the dead woman he had loved she 
came, now that he was age-stricken and nearing 
death, for in this one dream alone he had seemed 
to be an old man. 

Kennaston could not ever be sure; the broken 
dream remained an enigma; but he got sweet terror 
and happiness of the dream, for all that, tasting his 
moment of inexplicable poignant emotion: and 
therewith he was content. 


35 - 

Treats of Witches , Mixed Drinks, 
and the Weather 


M EANWHILE, I used to see Kennaston 
nearly every day. . . . Looking back, I 
recollect one afternoon when the Kennastons 
were calling on us. It was the usual sort of late- 
afternoon call customarily exchanged by country 
neighbors. . . . 

“We have been intending to come over for ever 
so long,” Mrs. Kennaston explained. “But we have 
been in such a rush, getting ready for the sum- 
mer — ” 

“We only got the carpets up yesterday,” my wife 
assented. “Riggs just kept promising and promis- 
ing, but he did finally get a man out — ” 

“Well, the roads are in pretty bad shape,” I sug- 
gested, “and those vans are fearfully heavy — ” 
“Still, if they would just be honest about it,” 
Mrs. Kennaston bewailed — “and not keep putting 
you off — No, I really don't think I ever saw the 
Loop road in worse condition — ■” 

214 


WITCHES, MIXED DRINKS, AND WEATHER 215 


It s the long rainy spell we ought to have had in 
May/’ I informed her. “The seasons are changing 
so, though, nowadays that nobody can keep up with 
them.” 

‘‘Yes, Felix was saying only to-day that we seem 
no longer to have any real spring. We simply go 
straight from winter into summer.” 

“I was endeavoring to persuade her,” Kennaston 
emended, “that it was foolish to go away as long as 
it stays cool as it is.” 

“Oh, yes, now!” my wife conceded. “But the 
paper says we are in for a long heat period about the 
fifteenth. For my part, I think July is always our 
worst month.” 

“It is just that you feel the heat so much more 
during the first warm days,” I suggested. 

“Oh, no!” my wife said, earnestly; “the nights 
are cool in August, and you can stand the days. Of 
course, there are apt to be a few mosquitoes in Sep- 
tember, but not many if you are careful about stand- 
ing water — ” 

“The drain-pipe to the gutter around our porch 
got stopped somehow, last year” — this Kennaston 
contributed, morosely — “and we had a terrible time.” 

“ — Then there is always so much to do, get- 
ting the children started at school,” my wife con- 
tinued — “everything under the sun needed at the 


216 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


last moment, of course ! And the way they change 
all the school-books every year is simply ridiculous. 
So, if I had my way, we would always go away 
early, and be back again in good time to get things 
in shape — ” 

“Oh, yes, if we could have our way!” — Mrs. 
Kennaston could not deny that — “but don’t your 
servants always want August off, to go home? I 
know ours do : and, my dear, you simply don’t dare 
say a word.” 

“That is the great trouble in the country,” I phi- 
losophized — “in fact, we suburbanites are pretty 
well hag-ridden by our dusky familiars. The old- 
time darkies are dying out, and the younger genera- 
tion is simply worthless. And with no more sense 
of gratitude — Why, Moira hired a new girl last 
week, to help out upstairs, and — ” 

“Oh, yes, hag-ridden! like the unfortunate ma- 
gicians in old stories!” Kennaston broke in, on a 
sudden. “We were speaking about such things the 
other day, you remember? I have been thinking — 
You see, every one tells me that, apart from being 
a master soapboiler, Mr. Harrowby, you are by 
way of being an authority on witchcraft and similar 
murky accomplishments?” And he ended with that 
irritating little noise, that was nearly a snigger, and 
just missed being a cough. 


WITCHES, MIXED DRINKS, AND WEATHER 217 


“It so often comes over me,” says Moira — which 
happens to be my wife’s name — “that Dick, all by 
himself, is really Harrowby & Sons, Inc.” — she 
spoke as if I were some sort of writing-fluid — “and 
has his products on sale all over the world. I look 
on him in a new light, so to speak, when I realize 
that daily he is gladdening Calcutta with his soaps, 
delighting London with his dentifrice, and comfort- 
ing Nova Zembla with his talcum powder.” 

“Well, but I inherited all that. It isn’t fair to 
fling ancestral soap- vats in my face,” I reminded 
her. “And yes, I have dabbled a bit in forces 
that aren’t as yet thoroughly understood, Mr. Ken- 
naston. I wouldn’t go so far as to admit to witch- 
craft, though. Very certainly I never attended a 
Sabbat.” 

I recollect now how his face changed. “And what 
in heaven’s name was a Sabbat?” Then he fidgeted, 
and crossed his legs the other way. 

“Well! it was scarcely heaven’s name that was 
invoked there, if old tales are to be trusted. Tra- 
ditionally, the Sabbat was a meeting attended by all 
witches in satisfactory diabolical standing, lightly 
attired in smears of various magical ointments ; and 
their vehicle of transportation to this outing was, of 
course, the traditional broomstick. Good Friday,” 
I continued, seeing they all seemed willing enough 


218 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


to listen, “was the favorite date for these gatherings, 
which were likewise held after dusk on St. John’s 
Eve, on Walburga’s Eve, and on Hallowe’en Night. 
The diversions were numerous : there was feasting, 
music, and dancing, with the devil performing obli- 
gatos on the pipes or a cittern, and not infrequently 
preaching a burlesque sermon. He usually attended 
in the form of a monstrous goat ; and when — when 
not amorously inclined, often thrashed the witches 
with their own broomsticks. The more practical 
pursuits of the evening included the opening of 
graves, to despoil dead bodies of finger- and toe- 
joints, and certain portions of the winding-sheet, 
with which to prepare a powder that had strange 
uses. . . . But the less said of that, the better. 
Here, also, the devil taught his disciples how to 
make and christen statues of wax, so that by roast- 
ing these effigies the persons whose names they bore 
would be wasted away by sickness.” 

“I see,” says Kennaston, intently regarding his 
fingernails : “they must have been highly enjoyable 
social outings, all around.” 

“They must have been worse than family re- 
unions,” put in Mrs. Kennaston, and affected to 
shudder. 

“Indeed, there are certain points of resemblance,” 
I conceded, “in the general atmosphere of jealous 


WITCHES, MIXED DRINKS, AND WEATHER 219 


hostility and the ruthless digging-up of what were 
better left buried.” 

Then Kennaston asked carelessly, “But how could 
such absurd superstitions ever get any hold on peo- 
ple, do you suppose ?” 

“That would require rather a lengthy explanation 
— Why, no,” I protested, in answer to his shrug; 
“the Sabbat is not inexplicable. Hahn-Kraftner’s 
book, or Herbert Perlin’s either, will give you a very 
fair notion of what the Sabbat really was — some- 
j thing not in the least grotesque, but infinitely more 
awe-inspiring than is hinted by any traditions in 
popular use. And Le Bret, whom bookdealers 
rightly list as ‘curious’ — ” 

“Yes. I have read those books, it happens. My 
uncle had them, you know. But” — Kennaston was 
plainly not quite at ease — “but, after all, is it not 
more wholesome to dismiss such theories as fantastic 
nonsense, even if they are perfectly true?” 

“Why, not of necessity,” said I. “As touches 
what we call the ‘occult,’ delusion after delusion has 
been dissipated, of course, and much jubilant pother 
made over the advance in knowledge. But the last 
of his delusions, which man has yet to relinquish, is 
that he invented them. This too must be surrem 
dered with time; and already we are beginning to 
learn that many of these wild errors are the illegiti* 


220 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


mate children of grave truths. Science now looks 
with new respect on folk-lore — ” 

“Mr. Kennaston,” says Moira, laughing, “I warn 
you, if you start Dick on his hobbies, he will talk us 
all to death. So, come into the house, and I will mix 
you two men a drink.” 

And we obeyed her, and — somehow — got to talk- 
ing of the recent thunderstorms, and getting in our 
hay, and kindred topics. 

Yes, it was much the usual sort of late-after noon 
call customarily exchanged by country neighbors. I 
remember Moira’s yawning as she closed the cel- 
larette, and her wondering how Mrs. Kennaston 
could keep on rouging and powdering at her age, 
and why Kennaston never had anything in particu- 
lar to say for himself? 

“Do you suppose it is because he has a swelled 
head over his little old book, or is he just naturally 
stupid?” she wanted to know. 


BOOK SIXTH 


e Alas! the sprite that haunts us 
Deceives our rash desire; 

It whispers of the glorious gods. 
And leaves us in the mire: 

We cannot learn the cipher 
Inscribed upon our cell; 

Stars taunt us with a mystery 
Which we lack lore to spell” 



















































N 










Sundry Disclosures of the Press 


S UCH as has been described was now Felix 
Kennaston’s manner of living, which, as 
touches utilitarian ends, it might be wiser 
forthwith to dismiss as bred by the sickly fancies of 
an idle man bemused with unprofitable reading. By 
day his half of the sigil lay hidden in the library, 
under a pile of unused bookplates. But nightly this 
bit of metal was taken with him to bed, in order that, 
when held so as to reflect the candlelight — for this 
was always necessary — it might induce the desired 
dream of Ettarre; and that, so, Horvendile would 
be freed of Felix Kennaston for eight hours unin- 
terruptedly. 

In our social ordering Felix Kennaston stayed 
worthy of consideration in Lichfield, both as a celeb- 
rity of sorts and as the owner of four bank-accounts j 
and colloquially, as likewise has been recorded, he 
was by ordinary dismissed from our patronizing dis- 
cussion as having long been “queer,” and in all 
223 


224 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


probability “a dope-fiend.” In Lichfield, as else- 
where, a man’s difference from his fellows cannot 
comfortably be conceded except by assuming the 
difference to be to his discredit. 

Meanwhile, the Felix Kennaston who owned two 
motors and had money in four banks, went with 
his wife about their round of decorous social duties; 
and the same Felix Kennaston, with leisured joy 
in the task, had completed The Tinctured Veil — 
which, as you now know, was woven from the 
dreamstuff Horvendile had fetched out of that fair 
country — very far from Lichfield — which is 
bounded by Avalon and Phaeacia and Sea-coast 
Bohemia, and the contiguous forests of Arden and 
Broceliande, and on the west of course by the Hes- 
perides. 

Then, just before The Tinctured Veil was pub- 
lished, an accident happened. 

Fate, as always frugal of display, used simple 
tools. Kennaston, midway in dressing, found he 
had no more mouthwash. He went into his wife’s 
bathroom, in search of a fresh bottle. Kathleen was 
in Lichfield for the afternoon, at a card party; and 
thus it was brought about that Kennaston found, 
lying in the comer of her bathroom press, and 
hidden by a bottle of Harrowby’s No. 7 Dental De- 
light, the missing half of the sigil of Scoteia — the 


SUNDRY DISCLOSURES OF THE PRESS 225 


half which Ettarre had retained. There was no 
doubt about it. He held it in his hand. 

“Now, that,” said Felix Kennaston, aloud, “is 
rather curious.” 

He went into the library, and lifted the little pile 
of unused bookplates; and presently the two pieces 
of metal lay united upon his wife’s dressing-table, 
between the manicure-set and the pincushion, form- 
ing a circle not quite three inches in diameter, just 
such as he had seen once upon the brow of Mother 
Isis, and again in the Didascalion when Ptolemy of 
the Fat Paunch was master of Egypt. 

“So, Kathleen somehow found the other half. 
She has had it from the first. . . . But naturally 
I never spoke of Felix Kennaston; it was forbid- 
den, and besides, the sigh's crowning grace was that 
it enabled me to forget his existence. And the girl'? 
name in the printed book is Alison. And Horven- 
dile is such an unimportant character that Kathleen, 
reading the tale hastily — I thought she simply 
skimmed it! — did not remember that name either; 
and so, did not associate the dream names in any 
way with my book, nor with me. . . . She 
too, then, does not know — as yet. . . . And, for all 
that, Kathleen, the real Kathleen, is Ettarre — 
‘whatever flesh she may wear as a garment!’ . . . 
Or, rather, Ettarre is to Kathleen as Horvendile- - 


226 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


but am I truly that high-hearted ageless being? Eh, 
I do not know, for we touch mystery everywhere. I 
only know it is the cream of the jest that day by 
day, while that lean, busy sharp-eyed stranger, whose 
hands and lips my own hands and lips meet daily, 
because this contact has become a part of the day’s 
routine — ” 

But he was standing before his wife’s dressing- 
table, and the mirror showed him a squat insignifi- 
cant burgess in shirtsleeves, with grizzled untidied 
hair, and mild accommodating pale eyes, and an in- 
adequate nose, with huge nostrils, and a spacious 
naked-looking upper-lip. That was Felix Kennas- 
ton, so far as were concerned all other people save 
Kathleen. He smiled; and in the act he noted that 
the visual result was to make Felix Kennaston ap- 
pear particularly inane and sheepish. But he knew 
now that did not matter. Nor did it greatly matter 
— his thoughts ran — that it was never permitted any 
man, not even in his dreams, ever to touch the hands 
and lips of Ettarre. 

So he left there the two pieces of metal, united at 
last upon his wife’s dressing-table, between the mani- 
cure-set and the pincushion, where on her return she 
might find them, and, finding, understand all that 
.which he lacked words to tell. 


37 - 

Considerations toward Sunset 


T HEN Kennaston went for a meditative walk 
in the abating glare of that day’s portentous 
sunset, wherein the tree-trunks westward 
showed like the black bars of a grate. It was in 
just such a twilight that Horvendile had left Storis- 
ende. . . . 

And presently he came to a field which had been 
mowed that week. The piled hay stood in rounded 
heaps, suggestive to Kennaston of shaggy giant 
heads bursting through the soil, as in the old myth 
of Cadmus and the dragon’s teeth; beyond were 
glittering cornfields, whose tremulous green was 
shot with brown and sickly yellow now, and which 
displayed a host of tassels like ruined plumes. Au- 
tumn was at hand. And as Kennaston approached, 
a lark — as though shot vehemently from the ground 
— rose singing. Straight into the air it rose, and 
was lost in the sun’s abating brilliance; but still you 
could hear its singing; and then, as suddenly, the 
bird dropped earthward. 

227 


228 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


Kennaston snapped his fingers. “Aha, my old 
acquaintance !” he said, “but now I envy you no 
longer!” Then he walked onward, thinking. . . . 

“What did I think of?” he said, long afterward 
— “oh, of nothing with any real clarity. You see — 
I touched mystery everywhere. . . . 

“But I thought of Kathleen’s first kiss, and of 
the first time I came to her alone after we were 
married, and of our baby that was bom dead. . . . 
I was happier than I had ever been in any dream. 

. . . I saw that the ties of our ordinary life here 
in the flesh have their own mystic strength and 
sanctity. I comprehended why in our highest sac- 
rament we prefigure with holy awe, not things of 
the mind and spirit, but flesh and blood. ... A 
man and his wife, barring stark severance, grow 
with time to be one person, you see; and it is not 
so much the sort of person as the indivisibility that 
matters, with them. . . . 

“And I thought of how in evoking that poor 
shadow of Ettarre which figures in my book, I had 
consciously written of my dear wife as I remem- 
bered her when we were young together. My vo- 
cabulary and my ink went to the making of the 
book’s Ettarre : but with them went Kathleen’s youth 
and purity and tenderness and serenity and loving- 


CONSIDERATIONS TOWARD SUNSET 229 


kindness toward all created things save the women 1 
had flirted with — so that she contributed more than 
I. . . . 

“And I saw that the good-smelling earth about my 
pudgy pasty body, and my familiar home — as 1 
turned back my pudgy pasty face toward Alcluid, 
bathed now in the sun’s gold — were lovely kindly 
places. Outside were kings and wars and thunder- 
ous zealots, and groaning, rattling thunderous 
printing-presses, too, that were turning off a book 
called The Tinctured Veil , whereinto had been dis- 
tilled and bottled up the very best that was in Felix 
Kennaston; but here was just ‘a citadel of peace 
in the heart of the trouble.’ And — well, I was satis- 
fied. People do not think much when they are satis- 
fied.” 

But he did not walk long; for it was growing 
chilly, as steadily dusk deepened, in this twilight so 
like that in which Horvendile had left Storisende 
forever. 


One Way of Elusion 


K ATHLEEN was seated at the dressing-table, 
arranging her hair, when Kennaston came- 
again into her rooms. He went forward, and 
without speaking, laid one hand upon each shoulder. 

Now for an instant their eyes met in the mirror; 
and the woman’s face he saw there, or seemed to see 
there, yearned toward him, and was unutterably 
loving, and compassionate, and yet was resolute in 
its denial. For it denied him, no matter with what 
wistful tenderness, or with what wonder at his folly. 
Just for a moment he seemed to see that; and then 
he doubted, for Kathleen’s lips lifted complaisantly 
to his, and Kathleen’s matter-of-fact face was just 
as he was used to seeing it. 

And thus, with no word uttered, Felix Kennas- 
ton understood that his wife must disclaim any 
knowledge of the sigil of Scoteia, should he be bold 
enough to speak of it. He knew he would never 
dare to speak of it in that constricted hide-bound 
230 


ONE WAY OF ELUSION 


231 


kindly life which he and Kathleen shared in the flesh. 
To speak of it would mean to become forthwith 
what people glibly called insane. So Horvendile and 
Ettarre were parted for all time. And Kathleen 
willed this, no matter with what wistful tenderness, 
and because of motives which he would never know 
— for how could one tell what was going on inside 
that small round head his hand was caressing? Still, 
he could guess at her reasons ; and he comprehended 
now that Ettarre had spoken a very terrible truth — • 
“All men I must evade at the last , and innumerable 
are the ways of my elusion ” 

“Well, dear,” he said aloud; “and was it a pleas- 
ant party?” 

“Oh, so-so,” Kathleen conceded; “but it was 
rather a mixed crowd. Hadn’t you better hurry and 
change your clothes, Felix? It is almost dinner- 
time, and, you know, we have seats for the theater 
to-night.” 

Quite as if he, too, were thinking of trifles, Felix 
Kennaston took up the two bits of metal. “I have 
often wondered what this design meant,” he said, 
idly — not looking at her, and hopeful that they were 
at least permitted this much of allusion to what they 
dared not speak of openly. 

“Perhaps Mr. Harrowby could tell you.” Kath- 
leen also spoke as if with indifference — not looking 


232 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


at him, but into the mirror, and giving deft final 
touches to her hair. 

“Eh — ?” Kennaston smiled. “Oh, yes, Dick 
Harrowby, I grant you, has dabbled a bit in occult 
matters, but hardly deep enough, I fancy, to explain 
— this.” 

“At all events,” Kathleen considered, “it is a 
quarter to seven already, and we have seats for the 
theater to-night.” 

He cleared his throat. “Shall I keep this, or you ?” 

“Why, for heaven’s sake — ! The thing is of no 
value now, Felix. Give it to me.” She dropped the 
two pieces of metal into the waste-basket by the 
dressing-table, and rose impatiently. “Of course 
if you don’t mean to change for dinner — ” 

He shrugged and gave it up. 

So they dined alone together, sharing a taciturn 
meal, and duly witnessed the drolleries of The 
Gutta-Percha Girl. Kennaston’s sleep afterward 
was sound and dreamless. 


39 - 

Past Storisende Fares the Road of 
Use and Wont 


H E read The Tinctured Veil in print, with 
curious wistful wonder. “How did I come 
to write it?” was his thought. 

Thereafter Felix Kennaston wrote no more books. 
He revised painstakingly, for the uniform edition of 
his works, the “privately printed” volumes of his 
remote youth; he collected a body of miscellaneous 
verse in the curiously unequal Chimes at Midnight: 
but after The Tinctured Veil he wrote nothing more 
save only those occasional papers which later were 
assembled in How Many Angels. “I am afraid to 
write against the author of Men Who Loved Ali- 
son,” he was wont flippantly to declare. And a few 
of us suspected even then that he spoke the plain 
truth. 

For this Kennaston to us seemed like an instru- 
ment that had been used to accomplish a needed bit 
of work, and, when the work was done, had been 
233 


234 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


put by. And he did not matter : what only mattered 
was the fact that we possessed Men Who Loved 
Alison. A quota of youngsters here and there, I 
know, begin to assert that we have in The Tinctured 
Veil an affair of even more grave importance, and 
they may be right. It is a question which will for 
our generation remain unsettled. 

Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Kennaston continued 
their round of decorous social duties : their dinner- 
parties were chronicled in the Lichfield Courier- 
Herald; and Kennaston delivered, by request, two 
scholarly addresses before the Lichfield Woman’s 
Club, was duly brought forward to shake hands 
with all celebrities who visited the city, and served 
acceptably in the vestry of his church. 

Was Felix Kennaston content? — that is a question 
he alone could have answered. 

“But why shouldn’t 1 have been?” he said, a 
little later, in reply to the pointblank query. “I had 
a handsome home, two motors, money in four banks, 
and a good-looking wife who loved and coddled me. 
The third prince gets no more at the end of any 
fairy tale. Still, the old woman spoke the truth, of 
course — one pays as one goes out. . . . Oh, yes, 
one pays! — that is an inevitable rule; but what you 
have to pay is not exorbitant, all things considered. 


THE ROAD OF USE AND WONT 


235 


. . . So, be off with your crude pessimisms, Har- 
rowby !” 

And indeed, when’one comes to think, he was in 
no worse case than any other husband of his stand- 
ing. “Who wins his love must lose her,” as no less 
tunefully than wisely sings one of our poets — a mar- 
ried bard, you may be sure — and all experience tends 
to prove his warbling perfectly veracious. Romanc- 
ers, from Time’s nonage, have invented and have 
manipulated a host of staple severances for their 
puppet lovers — sedulously juggling, ever since 
Menander’s heyday, with compromising letters and 
I unscrupulous rivals and shipwrecks and wills and 
testy parents and what not — and have contrived to 
! show love over-riding these barriers plausibly 
enough. But he must truly be a boldfaced rhapso- 
dist who dared at outset marry his puppets, to each 
other, and tell you how their love remained un- 
changed. 

I am thus digressing, in obsolete Thackerayan 
fashion, to twaddle about love-matches alone. Peo- 
ple marry through a variety of other reasons, and 
with varying results : but to marry for love is to in- 
vite inevitable tragedy. There needs no side-glancing 
here at such crass bankruptcies of affection as end in 
homicide or divorce proceedings, or even just in 


236 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


daily squabbling: these dramas are of the body. 
They may be taken as the sardonic comedies, or at 
their most outrageous as the blustering cheap melo- 
dramas, of existence; and so lie beyond the tragic 
field. For your true right tragedy is enacted on the 
stage of a man’s soul, with the man’s reason as lom 
auditor. 

And being happily married — but how shall I word 
it? Let us step into the very darkest corner. Now, 
my dear Mr. Grundy, your wife is a credit to her sex, 
an ornament to her circle, and the mainstay of your 
home; and you, sir, are proverbially the most com- 
placent and uxorious of spouses. But you are not, 
after all, married to the girl you met at the chancel- 
rail, so long and long ago, with un forgotten trem- 
blings of the knees. Your wife, that estimable 
matron, is quite another person. And you live in the 
same house, and you very often see her with hair 
uncombed, or even with a disheveled temper; you 
are familiar with her hours of bathing, her visits to 
the dentist, and a host of other physical phenomena 
we need not go into; she does not appreciate your 
jokes; she peeps into your personal correspondence; 
she keeps the top bureau-drawer in a jumble of veils 
and gloves and powder-rags and hair-pins and 
heaven knows what; her gowns continually require 
to be buttoned up the back in an insane incalculable 


THE ROAD OF USE AND WONT 


237 


fashion ; she irrationally orders herring for break- 
fast, though you never touch it : — and, in fine, your 
catalogue of disillusionments is endless. 

Hand upon heart, my dear Mr. Grundy, is this 
the person to whom you despatched those letters you 
wrote before you were married? Your wife has 
those epistles safely put away somewhere, you may 
depend on it: and for what earthly consideration 
would you read them aloud to her? Some day, 
when one or the other of you is dead, those letters 
will ring true again and rouse a noble sorrow; and 
the survivor will be all the better for reading them. 
But now they only prove you were once free of 
uplands which you do not visit nowadays : and this 
common knowledge is a secret every wife must share 
half-guiltily with her husband — even in your hap- 
piest matrimonial ventures — as certainly as it is the 
one topic they may not ever discuss with profit. 

For you are married, you and she: and you live, 
contentedly enough, in a four-square world, where 
there is the rent and your social obligations and the 
children’s underclothing to be considered, long and 
long before indulgence in rattle-pate mountain-climb- 
ing. And people glibly think of you as Mr. and Mrs. 
Grundy now, almost as a unit: but do you really 
know very much about that woman whose gentle 
breathing — for we will not crudely call it snoring — 


238 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


you are privileged, now, to hear every night until 
the one or the other of you is done with breathing? 
Suppose, by a wild flight of fancy, that she is no 
more honest with you than you are with her? 

So to Kennaston his wife remained a not un- 
friendly mystery. They had been as demi-gods for 
a little while; and the dream had faded, to leave it 
matters not what memories ; and they were only Mr. 
and Mrs. Felix Bulmer Kennaston. Of all of us, 
my fellow failures in the great and hopeless adven- 
ture of matrimony, this apologue is narrated. 

Yet, as I look into my own wife’s face — no more 
the loveliest, but still the dearest of all earthly faces, 
I protest — and as I wonder how much she really 
knows about me or the universe at large, and have 
not the least notion, — why, I elect to believe that, in 
the ultimate, Kennaston was not dissatisfied. For 
all of us the dream-haze merges into the glare of 
common day; the dea certe, whom that fled roseate 
light transfigured, stands confessed a simple loving 
woman, a creature of like flesh and limitations as 
our own : but who are we to mate with goddesses ? 
It is enough that much in us which is not merely 
human has for once found exercise — has had its 
high-pitched outing, however fleet — and that, be- 
cause of many abiding memories, we know, as- 


THE ROAD OF USE AND WONT 


239 


suredly, the way of flesh is not a futile scurrying 
through dining-rooms and offices and shops and 
parlors, and thronged streets and restaurants, “and 
so to bed.” 


40 . 

Which Mr. Flaherty Does Not Quite Explain 


W ITH the preceding preachment I wish I 
might end the story. For what follows — 
which is my own little part in the story of 
Felix Kennaston — is that discomfortable sort of 
anticlimax wherein the key to a mystery, by un- 
locking unsuspected doors, discloses only another 
equally perplexing riddle. 

Kathleen Kennaston died in her sleep some eleven 
months after her husband discovered the missing 
half of the sigil. . . . 

“I have a sort of headache,” she said, toward nine 
o’clock in the evening. “I believe I will go to bed, 
Felix.” So she kissed him goodnight, in just that 
emotionless preoccupied fashion that years of living 
together hnd made familiar; and so she left him in 
the music-room, to smoke and read magazines. He 
never saw her living any more. 

Kathleen stopped in the hall, to wind the clock. 
“Don’t forget to lock the front door when you 
240 


MR. FLAHERTY DOES NOT EXPLAIN 


241 


come up, Felix.” She was out of sight, but he 
could hear her, as well as the turning of the clock 
key. “I forgot to tell you I saw Adele Van Orden 
to-day, at Greenberg’s. They are going down to 
the Beach Thursday. She told me they haven’t had 
a cook for three days now, and she and old Mrs. 
Haggage have had to do all the work. She looked 
it, too — I never saw any one let themselves go all to 
pieces the way she has — ” 

“How — ? Oh, yes,” he mumbled, intent upon 
his reading; “it is pretty bad. Don’t many of them 
keep their looks as you do, dear — ” 

And that was all. He never heard his wife’s 
voice any more. Kennaston read contentedly for a 
couple of hours, and went to bed. It was in the 
morning the maid found Mrs. Kennaston dead and 
cold. She had died in her sleep, quite peacefully, 
after taking two headache powders, while her hus- 
band was contentedly pursuing the thread of a mag- 
azine story through the advertising columns. . . . 

Kennaston had never spoken to her concerning 
the sigil. Indeed, I do not well see how he could 
have dared to do so, in view of her attitude in a 
world so opulent in insane asylums. But among 
her effects, hidden away as before in the press in 
her bathroom, Kennaston found both the pieces of 
metal. They were joined together now, forming a 


242 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


perfect circle, but with the line of their former sepa- 
ration yet visible. 

He showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told 
this tale. . . . 

I had thought from the first there would prove 
to be supernal double-dealing back of all this. The 
Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar strange win- 
dows, I suspect — windows which face on other 
worlds than ours ; and They permit this-or-that man 
to peer out fleetingly, perhaps, just for the joke's 
sake; since always They humorously contrive mat- 
ters so this man shall never be able to convince his 
fellows of what he has seen, or of the fact that he 
was granted any peep at all. The Wardens with- 
out fail arrange what we call — gravely, too — “some 
natural explanation." 

Kennaston showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having 
told this tale. . . . 

“You are interested in such things, you see — 
just as Kathleen said. And I have sometimes won- 
dered if when she said, 'Perhaps Mr. Harrowby 
could tell you,’ the words did not mean more than 
they seemed then to mean — ?” 

I was interested now, very certainly. But I knew 
that Kathleen Kennaston had referred not at all to 


MR. FLAHERTY DOES NOT EXPLAIN 


243 


my interest in certain of the less known sides of 
existence, which people loosely describe as “occult.” 

And slowly, I comprehended that for the thou- 
sandth time the Wardens of Earth were uncom- 
promised ; that here too They stayed unconvicted of 
negligence in Their duty: for here was at hand 
the “natural explanation.” Kennaston’s was one 
of those curious, but not uncommon, cases of self- 
hypnosis, such as Fehlig and Alexis Bidoche have 
investigated and described. Kennaston’s first dream 
of Ettarre had been an ordinary normal dream, in 
no way particularly remarkable; and afterward, his 
will to dream again of Ettarre, co-operating with 
his queer reading, his temperament, his idle life, 
his belief in the sigil, and co-operating too — as yet 
men may not say just how — with the hypnotic ef- 
fects of any small bright object when gazed at 
steadily, had been sufficient to induce more dreams. 
I could understand how it had all befallen in con- 
sonance with hackneyed laws, insane as was the out- 
come. 

And the prelate and the personage had referred, 
of course, to the then-notorious nineteenth and 
twentieth chapters of Men Who Loved Alison , in 
which is described the worship of the sigil of 
Scoteia — and which chapters they, in common with 


244 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


a great many other people, considered unnecessarily 
to defile a noble book. The coincidence of the mir- 
rors was quaint, but in itself came to less than noth- 
ing; for as touches the two questions as to white 
pigeons, the proverb alluded to by the personage, 
concerning the bird that fouls its own nest, is fairly 
familiar, and the prelate’s speech was the most 
natural of prosaic inquiries. What these two men 
had said and done, in fine, amounted to absolutely 
nothing until transfigured, in the crucible of an ar- 
dent imagination, by the curious literary notion that 
human life as people spend it is purposeful and 
clearly motived. 

For what Kennaston showed me was the metal top 
of a cold cream jar. I am sure of this, for Har- 
rowby’s Creme Cleopatre is one of the most popular 
articles our firm manufactures. I hesitate to tell 
you how many thousand husbands may find at will 
among their wives’ possessions just such a talisman 
as Kennaston had discovered. I myself selected the 
design for these covers when the stuff was first put in 
the market. They are sealed on, you may remember, 
with gray wax, to carry out the general idea that we 
are vending old Egyptian secrets of beauty. And 
the design upon these covers, as I have since been at 
pains to make sure, is in no known alphabet. P. N. 
Flaherty (the artist implicated) tells me he “just 


MR. FLAHERTY DOES NOT EXPLAIN 


245 


made it up out of his head” — blending meaningless 
curlicues and dots and circles with an irresponsible 
hand, and sketching a crack across all, “just to make 
it look ancient like.” It was along this semblance 
of a fracture — for there the brittle metal is thinnest 
— that the cover first picked up by Kennaston had 
been broken. The cover he showed me was, of 
course, complete. ... So much for Mr. Flaherty’s 
part in the matter; and of hieroglyphic lore, or any 
acquaintance with heathenry beyond his gleanings 
from the moving pictures, I would be the last person 
to suspect him. 

It was natural that Mrs. Kennaston should have 
used Harrowby’s Creme Cleopatre habitually; for 
indeed, as my wife had often pointed out, Mrs. 
Kennaston used a considerable amount of toilet 
preparations. And that Mrs. Allardyce should have 
had a jar of Harrowby’s Creme Cleopatre in her 
handbag was almost inevitable : there is no better 
restorative and cleanser for the complexion, after 
the dust and dirt of a train-journey, as is unani- 
mously acknowledged by Harrowby & Son’s adver- 
tisements. 

But there is the faith that moves mountains, as 
we glibly acknowledge with unconcernment as to the 
statement’s tremendous truth; and Felix Kennaston 
had believed in his talisman implicitly from the very 


246 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


first. Thus, through his faith, and through we know 
not what soul-hunger, so many long hours, and — 
here is the sardonic point — so many contented and 
artistically-fruitful hours of Kennaston’s life in 
the flesh had been devoted to contemplation of a 
mirage. It was no cause for astonishment that he 
had more than once surprised compassion and a won- 
der in his wife’s eyes : indeed, she could hardly have 
failed to suspect his mind was affected ; but, loving 
him, she had tried to shield him, as is the way of 
women. ... I found the whole matter droll and 
rather heart-breaking. But the Wardens of Earth 
were uncompromised, so far as I could prove. 
Whatever windows had or had not been unbarred, 
there remained no proof. . . . 

So I shook my head. “Why, no,” said I, with 
at worst a verbal adhesion to veracity, “I, for one, 
do not know what the design means. Still, you have 
never had this deciphered,” I added, gently. “Sup- 
pose — suppose there had been some mistake, Mr. 
Kennaston — that there was nothing miraculous about 
the sigil, after all — ?” 

I cannot tell you of his expression ; but it caused 
me for the moment to feel disconcertingly little and 
obtuse. 


MR. FLAHERTY DOES NOT EXPLAIN 247 


“Now, how can you say that, I wonder!” he mar- 
veled — and then, of course, he fidgeted, and crossed 
his legs the other way — “when I have been telling 
you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great 
thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is 
miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests 
within the power of each of us to awaken at will 
from a dragging nightmare of life made up of un- 
important tasks and tedious useless little habits, to 
see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite 
wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the 
top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, 
nor my fixed faith. No, Harrowby, the common 
names we call things by do not matter — except to 
show how very dull we are,” he ended, with that 
irritating noise that was nearly a snigger, and just 
missed being a cough. 

And I was sorely tempted. . . . You see, I never 
liked Felix Kennaston. The man could create 
beauty, to outlive him ; but in his own appearance he 
combined grossness with insignificance, and he added 
thereto a variety of ugly senseless little mannerisms. 
He could evolve interesting ideas, as to Omnipo- 
tence, the universe, art, life, religion, himself, his 
wife, a candlestick or a comet — anything— and very 
probably as to me; but his preferences and his 


248 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


limitations would conform and color all these ideas 
until they were precisely what he desired to believe, 
no more or less ; and, having them, he lacked means, 
or courage, to voice his ideas adequately, so that to 
talk with him meant a dull interchange of common- 
places. Again, he could aspire toward chivalric love, 
that passion which sees in womankind High God 
made manifest in the loveliest and most perfect of 
His creations; but in the quest he had succeeded 
merely in utilizing womenfolk either as toys to 
play with and put by or as drudges to wait on him ; 
yet, with all this, he could retain unshaken his faith 
in and his worship of that ideal woman. He could 
face no decision without dodging; no temptation 
without compromise; and he lied, as if by instinct, 
at the threatened approach of discomfort or of his 
fellows* disapproval: yet devils, men and seraphim 
would conspire in vain in any effort to dissuade him 
from his self-elected purpose. For, though he would 
do no useful labor he could possibly avoid, he could 
grudge nothing to the perfection of his chosen art, 
in striving to perpetuate the best as he saw it. 

In short, to me this man seemed an inadequate 
kick worthy creature, who had muddled away the 
only life he was quite certain of enjoying, in con- 
templation of a dream; and who had, moreover, 
despoiled the lives of others, too, for the dream’s 


MR. FLAHERTY DOES NOT EXPLAIN 


249 


sake. To him the dream alone could matter — his, 
proud assurance that life was not a blind and aim- 
less business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion ; 
and that he, this gross weak animal, could be strong 
and excellent and wise, and his existence a pageant 
of beauty and nobility. To prove this dream was 
based on a delusion would be no doubt an enjoyable 
retaliation, for Kennaston’s being so unengaging to 
the eye and so stupid to talk to ; but it would make 
the dream no whit less lovely or less dear to him — 
or to the rest of us, either. 

For it occurred to me that his history was, in es- 
sentials, the history of our race, thus far. All I 
advanced for or against him, equally, was true of 
all men that have ever lived. . . . For it is in this 
inadequate flesh that each of us must serve his 
dream ; and so, must fail in the dream’s service, and 
must parody that which he holds dearest. To this 
we seem condemned, being what we are. Thus, one 
and all, we play false to the dream, and it evades us, 
and we dwindle into responsible citizens. And yet 
always thereafter — because of many abiding mem- 
ories — we know, assuredly, that the way of flesh is 
not a futile scurrying through dining-rooms and 
offices and shops and parlors, and thronged streets 
and restaurants, “and so to bed.” . . . 

It was in appropriate silence, therefore, that I 


250 


THE CREAM OF THE JEST 


regarded Felix Kennaston, as a parable. The man 
was not merely very human ; he was humanity. And 
I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in 
human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some 
day make them come true. 


Modern Library of the IV or Id's Best Books 
COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN 

THE MODERN LIBRARY 

For convenience in ordering 
please use number at right of title 


ADAMS, HENRY 
AIKEN, CONRAD 

AIKEN, CONRAD 
ANDERSON, SHERWOOD 
ANDERSON, SHERWOOD 
ANDREYEV, LEONID 

APULEIUS, LUCIUS 
ARTZIBASHEV, MICHAEL 

BALZAC 
BALZAC 
BAUDELAIRE 
BEEBE, WILLIAM 
BEERBOHM, MAX 
BENNETT, ARNOLD 
BIERCE, AMBROSE 
BLAKE, WILLIAM 
BOCCACCIO 
BRONTE, CHARLOTTE 
BRONTE, EMILY 
BURTON, RICHARD 
BUTLER, SAMUEL 
BUTLER, SAMUEL 

CABELL, JAMES BRANCH 
CABELL, JAMES BRANCH 
CARPENTER, EDWARD 
CARROLL, LEWIS 
CASANOVA, JACQUES 
CATHER, WILLA 
CELLINI, BENVENUTO 
CERVANTES 
CHAUCER 

CHESTERTON, G. K. 


The Education of Henry Adams 76 
A Comprehensive Anthology of 
American Verse 101 
Modern American Poetry 127 
Poor White 1 1 5 
Winesburg, Ohio 104 
The Seven That Were Hanged, and 
the Red Laugh 45 
The Golden Ass 88 
Sanine 189 

Droll Stories 193 
Short Stories 40 
Prose and Poetry 70 
Jungle Peace 30 
Zuleika Dobson 116 
The Old Wives' Tale 184 
In the Midst of Life 133 
Poems 91 

The Decameron 71 

Jane Eyre 64 

Wuthering Heights 106 

The Arabian Nights 201 

Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited 136 

The Way of All Flesh 13 

Beyond Life 25 

The Cream of the Jest 126 

Love’s Coming of Age 51 

Alice in Wonderland, etc. 79 

Memoirs of Casanova 165 

Death Comes for the Archbishop 191 

Autobiography of Cellini 3 

Don Quixote 174 

The Canterbury Tales 161 

Man Who Was Thursday 35 


CONRAD, JOSEPH 

CONRAD, JOSEPH 
CONRAD, JOSEPH 
CORNEILLE and RACINE 
CORVO, FREDERICK BARON 
CRANE, STEPHEN 
CUMMINGS, E. E. 

D’ANNUNZIO, GABRIELE 
DANTE 

DAUDET, ALPHONSE 
DEFOE, DANIEL 
DEWEY, JOHN 
DICKENS, CHARLES 
DOS PASSOS, JOHN 
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR 
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR 
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR 
DOUGLAS, NORMAN 
DOUGLAS, NORMAN 
DOWSON, ERNEST 
DREISER, THEODORE 
DREISER, THEODORE 
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE 
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE 
DU MAURI ER, GEORGE 

EDMAN, IRWIN 
ELLIS, HAVELOCK 

FAULKNER, WILLIAM 
FEUCHTWANGER, LION 
FIELDING, HENRY 
FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE 
FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE 
FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE 
FRANCE, ANATOLE 
FRANCE, ANATOLE 
FRANCE, ANATOLE 
FRANCE, ANATOLE 
FRANCE, ANATOLE 
FRANCE, ANATOLE 
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN 

GALSWORTHY, JOHN 

GAUTIER, THEOPH1LE 
GEORGE, W. L. 

GIDE, ANDRE 
GILBERT, W. S. 

GILBERT, W. S. 


Heart of Darkness 

(In Great Modern Short Stories 168) 
Lord Jim 186 
Victory 34 

Six Plays of Corneille and Racine 194 
A History of the Borgias 192 
Maggie, and Other Stories 10a 
The Enormous Room 214 

Flame of Life 65 
The Divine Comedy 208 
Sapho 85 

Moll Flanders 122 

Human Nature and Conduct 173 

Pickwick Papers 204 

Three Soldiers 205 

Crime and Punishment 199 

The Brothers Karamazov 151 

Poor People 10 

Old Calabria 141 

South Wind 5 

Poems and Prose 74 

Sister Carrie 8 

Twelve Men 148 

Camille 69 

The Three Musketeers 143 
Peter Ibbetson 207 

The Philosophy of Plato 181 
The Dance of Life 160 

Sanctuary 61 
Power 206 
Tom Jones 185 
Madame Bovary 28 
Salammbo x 1 8 

Temptation of St. Anthony 92 

Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard 22 

Penguin Island 210 

The Queen Pedauque no 

The Red Lily 7 

The Revolt of the Angels 11 

Thais 67 

Autobiography, etc. 39 
The Apple Tree 

(In Great Modern Short Stories 168) 
Mile. De Maupin 53 
A Bed of Roses 75 
The Counterfeiters 187 
The Mikado, Iolanthe, etc. 26 
Pinafore and Other Plays 113 


GISSING, GEORGE 
GISSING, GEORGE 
GOETHE 
GOETHE 

GORKY, MAXIM 


HARDY, THOMAS 
HARDY, THOMAS 
HARDY, THOMAS 
HARDY, THOMAS 
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL 
HEARN, LAFCADIO 
HECHT, BEN 
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST 
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST 
HOMER 
HOMER 

HUDSON, W. H. 

HUDSON, W. H. 

HUGHES, RICHARD 
HUNEKER, JAMES G. 
HUXLEY, ALDOUS 
HUXLEY, ALDOUS 
HUYSMANS, J. K. 

IBSEN, HENRIK 
IBSEN, HENRIK 

IBSEN HENRIK 


JAMES, HENRY 
JAMES, HENRY 
JAMES, WILLIAM 
JOYCE, JAMES 
JOYCE, JAMES 


KENT, ROCKWELL 
KOMROFF, MANUEL 
KUPRIN, ALEXANDRE 

LAWRENCE, D. H. 
LAWRENCE, D. H. 

LEWIS, SINCLAIR 
LEWISOHN, LUDWIG 
LONGFELLOW, HENRY W. 
LOUYS, PIERRE 
LUDWIG, EMIL 


New GruD Street 125 

Private Papers of Henry Ryeeroft 46 

Faust 177 

The Sorrows of Werther 

(In Collected German Stories 108) 
Creatures That Once Were Men and 
Other Stories 48 

Jude the Obscure 135 
The Mayor of Casterbridge 17 
The Return of the Native 121 
Tess of the D’Urbervilles 72 
The Scarlet Letter 93 
Some Chinese Ghosts 130 
Erik Dorn 29 
A Farewell To Arms 91 
The Sun Also Rises 170 
The Iliad 166 
The Odyssey 167 
Green Mansions 89 
The Purple Land 24 
A High Wind in Jamaica 112 
Painted Veils 43 
Antic Hay 209 
Point Counter Point 180 
Against the Grain 183 

A Doll’s House, Ghosts, etc. 6 
Hedda Gabler, Pillars of Society, The 
Master Builder 36 

The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The 
League of Youth, Peer Gynt 54 

Daisy Miller, etc. 63 

The Turn of the Screw 169 

The Philosophy of William James 114 

Dubliners 124 

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young 
Man 145 

Wilderness 182 
Oriental Romances 55 
Yam a 203 

The Rainbow 128 
Sons and Lovers 109 
Arrowsmith 42 
Up Stream 123 
Poems 56 
Aphrodite 77 
Napoleon 95 


MANSFIELD, KATHERINE 
MANN, THOMAS 

MANN, THOMAS 
MARX, KARL 

MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET 
MAUPASSANT, GUY DE 
MAUPASSANT, GUY DE 
McFEE, WILLIAM 
MENCKEN, H. L. 
MELVILLE, HERMAN 
MEREDITH, GEORGE 
MEREDITH, GEORGE 
MEREJKOWSKI, DMITRI 
MEREJKOWSKI, DMITRI 
MEREJKOWSKI, DMITRI 

MISCELLANEOUS 


MOLIERE 
MOORE, GEORGE 
MORLEY, CHRISTOPHER 

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH 
NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH 
NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH 
NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH 

O’NEILL, EUGENE 
O’NEILL, EUGENE 

PATER, WALTER 
PATER, WALTER 
PEPYS, SAMUEL 
PETRONIUS ARBITER 
PLATO 


The Garden Party 129 
Death in Venice 

(In Collected German Stories 108) 
The Magic Mountain 200 
Capital and Other Writings 202 
Of Human Bondage 176 
Best Short Stories 98 
Une Vie and Bel Ami 57 
Casuals of the Sea 195 
Selected Prejudices 107 
Moby Dick 119 
Diana of the Crossways 14 
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 134 
The Death of the Gods 1 53 
Peter and Alexis 175 
The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci 138 

An Anthology of American Negro 
Literature 163 

A Modern Book of Criticism 81 
Best Ghost Stories 73 
Best Am'er. Humorous Short Stories 87 
Best Russian Short Stories 1 8 
Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays 94 
Four Famous Greek Plays 1 58 
Fourteen Great Detective Stories 144 
Great German Short Novels and 
Stories 108 

Great Modern Short Stories 168 
The Making of Man: An Outline of 
Anthropology 149 

Outline of Abnormal Psychology 152 
Outline of Psychoanalysis 66 
The Sex Problem in Modern Society 198 
Plays 78 

Confessions of a Young Man 16 
Parnassus on Wheels 190 

Beyond Good and Evil 20 
Ecce Homo and the Birth of Tragedy 68 
Genealogy of Morals 62 
Thus Spake Zarathustra 9 

The Emperor Jones and The Straw 146 
Seven Plays of the Sea in 

The Renaissance 86 
Marius the Epicurean 90 
Samuel Pepys’ Diary 103 
The Satyricon 156 
The Philosophy of Plato 181 


POE, EDGAR ALLAN 
POLO, MARCO 
PREVOST, ANTOINE 
PROUST, MARCEL 
PROUST, MARCEL 
PROUST, MARCEL 

RABELAIS 
RENAN, ERNEST 
RODIN 

ROSTAND, EDMOND 
RUSSELL, BERTRAND 

SCHNITZLER, ARTHUR 

SCHOPENHAUER 
SCHOPENHAUER 
SCHREINER, OLIVE 
SHAW, G. B. 

SMOLLETT, TOBIAS 
SPINOZA 

STEIN, GERTRUDE 
STENDHAL 
STERNE, LAURENCE 
STOKER, BRAM 
STRACHEY, LYTTON 
STRINDBERG, AUGUST 
SUDERMANN, HERMANN 
SUDERMANN, HERMANN 
SUETONIUS 
SWIFT, JONATHAN 

SWINBURNE, CHARLES 
SYMONDS, JOHN A. 

TCHEKOV 

TCHEKOV 

THACKERAY, WILLIAM 
THOMPSON, FRANCIS 
TOLSTOY, LEO 
TOMLINSON, H. M. 
TURGENEV, IVAN 
TURGENEV, IVAN 

VAN LOON, HENDRIK W. 
VAN VECHTEN, CARL 
VILLON, FRANCOIS 
VOLTAIRE 

WALLACE, LEW 


Best Tales 82 

The Travels of Marco Polo 196 
Manon Lescaut 85 
Guermantes Way 213 
Swann's Way 59 
Within A Budding Grove 17a 

Gargantua and Pantagruel 4 

The Life of Jesus 140 

64 Reproductions 41 

Cyrano de Bergerac 1 54 

Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell 137 

Reigen (Hands Around), Anatol and 
Other Stories 32 

The Philosophy of Schopenhauer 52 

Studies in Pessimism 12 

The Story of an African Farm 132 

An Unsocial Socialist 1 5 

Humphrey Clinker 159 

The Philosophy of Spinoza 60 

Three Lives 21 1 

The Red and the Black 157 

Tristram Shandy 147 

Dracula 31 

Eminent Victorians 212 
Married, and Miss Julie 2 
Dame Care 33 
The Song of Songs 162 
Lives of the Twelve Caesars 188 
Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub, The 
Battle of the Books 100 
Poems 23 

The Life of Michelangelo 49 
Short Stories 50 

Sea Gull, Cherry Orchard, Three Sis- 
ters, etc. 1 71 
Vanity Fair 131 
Complete Poems 38 
Anna Karenina 37 
The Sea and The Jungle 99 
Fathers and Sons 21 
Smoke 80 

Ancient Man 105 
Peter Whiffle 164 
Poems 58 
Candide 47 

Ben Hur 139 


WHISTLER, J. McNEIL 
WHITMAN, WALT 


WILDE, OSCAR 
WILDE, OSCAR 
WILDE, OSCAR 
WILDE, OSCAR 


WAUGH, EVELYN 


WELLS, H. G. 
WELLS, H. G. 


WILDER, THORNTON 
WOOLF, VIRGINIA 


WALPOLE, HUGH 


Fortitude 178 
Vile Bodies 120 
Ann Veronica 27 
Tono Bungay 197 

Life and Art, with 32 Reproductions 1 5$ 
Leaves o f Grass 97 
De Profundis 117 
Dorian Gray 1 

The Plays of Oscar Wilde 83 
Poems and Fairy Tales 84 
The Cabala 155 
Mrs. Dalloway 96 


YEATS, W. B. 
YOUNG, G. F. 


Irish Fairy and Folk Tales 44 
The Medici 179 


ZOLA, EMILE 


Nana 142 
Amok 


ZWEIG, STEFAN 


(In Collected German Stories 108) 


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